Eversince Ruth was borned, Reuben has been exhibiting some feelings of anxiety and insecurity. He starts to wake up in the middle of the night and wanders into our bed every night. I’m not used to having one wriggly little boy kicking and tossing around so with night feeds to Ruth and his untimely visits, it was taking a toil on me. So we began a series of strategies to keep him in his own bed.
So Daniel & I ‘divide and conquer’ between the 2 younger ones. As he has to take on Reuben, he starts receiving ‘night calls’ like: “Papa, I’m cold, please cover me”, “Papa, I’m wet, please change my diapers”, “Papa, hold me hand” etc. It can get tiring doing this night after night so on some nights, the father refused to respond and before he knew it, the little boy is in our bed. On those nights he chose to wait up for Reuben after ignoring the first call and then tried to catch him in the middle of his tracks and then shooed him back to his bed. It does sound comical here because the father would just suddenly turn on the light switch and found Reuben stopped dead in the middle of climbing up our bed frame, pretending that he’s just a fixture on that frame! And this will go on a few more times like a game to see who will outsmart the other one.
Some other nights Reuben was probably more tired then usual and since he was prohibited from going into any others’ bed, he either fell asleep leaning against one of our beds or he would just lie down on the floor just outside our bedrooms, just not giving up:
So one will get shocked in the middle of the night if one’s on the way out to take a drink and then see this dark shadow lying across the path. Wonder what he thinks of it in a few years’ time….
