The sweetest little boy ever

I’m usually the one who puts Torsten to bed. Almost every night for his 17 months on this planet, I’ve put Torsten’s Boppy pillow on my lap, and picked up the little guy and a bottle and rocked him to sleep in the squeaky rocking chair. Even now that he has to be at least a meter tall (he’s huge), I rock him down and carry him in to bed. Someday he’ll be too big for this, and sometimes I’m too tired to do it (I do it anyway), but I admit that there’s something delicious about snuggling with your child as he falls asleep at night on your lap. They’re in constant motion so much of the day that it’s nice, for a few moments anyway, to be still and cuddle.

Up until the last month, he was always asleep by the time I took him in, but these days, he’s usually still awake when he finishes his bottle and he smiles and lets me take him in to bed, laying him down on the Boppy with one of his bears and tucking him in.

Sometimes he cries, but usually he just smiles or talks to his bears and is in any event almost always completely out within a few minutes.

Last night, though, was very sweet. For a couple of evenings now, he’s been turning his head when he finishes the bottle, eyes closed, to give me a kiss before I take him in to sleep. He’s a lovey baby – lots of hugs and kisses – but there’s something almost unbearably sweet about your child deciding, half-asleep, that the last thing he needs to do at night before he passes out is to give his Mama a kiss.

Last night was really cute, though. He usually crashes about 8:30, and I was exhausted by 7 and went in to take a nap while he played with his papa. Apparently, while I was sleeping, he had already downed his bottle and was still quite awake, so when Christian very rudely woke me up at the requested hour (really – he scared the crap out of me!), I was not looking forward to taking care of a not-ready-to-sleep baby for a couple of hours.

Instead, though, he climbed into bed with Christian (who had decided to come lie down on the other side to snuggle) and me, snuggled up to me while putting his arm around my shoulder, and smiled, his head turning back and forth between his papa and me as his eyes started to close with his head on my pillow. After a while, what became clear was that he’d climbed in with Mama to go to sleep, so Christian left, and Torsten just snuggled there, smiling with his eyes closed every time I gave him a kiss on the cheek, totally content.

Ten minutes later, when he’d really passed out, I carried him over to his bed and he smiled again, asleep, as I put him into it with his bear.

We have such a nice little boy.