I made another video for Ian this morning. I’ve actually been doing these every weekday. Our beautiful little guy even asked me a couple of mornings ago when I had to pop in for a second, “Daddy, did you send me a video?” I’m so happy these are things he looks forward to.
In this video I referred to something that happened yesterday, as I often do. It was getting pretty late. We hadn’t even finished showering until just after 9 pm. No surprise Ian wanted to play a little more. As we were drying off (and he was yawning), he asked if there wasn’t something we could do — a game or something?
I told him that, actually, I would also love to keep playing — all night even! But I told him that while we’re sleeping the little construction workers in our bodies are busy taking all of the good things we ate and all the exercise we did that day to build us longer and stronger bones and bigger and stronger muscles. As I coaxed him into bed I added that our little imagination makers are even tidying up our brains while we dream.
That was all well and good, but couldn’t we just watch one dinosaur video or play that airplane game we like?
I said I knew it wasn’t easy to go to bed when you still feel like having fun. It’s actually pretty hard. Then I reminded him doing hard things makes us strong. And when we’re strong, especially in our minds and hearts (I would point and say “here and here”), we have more choices in life. That means we can be the kind of person we want to be and have the kinds of lives we want to have.
Ian understood. He said that means he can be a firefighter, a police officer, a paleontologist, even a chess player. I told him he was right and that he would have to work hard to do any of those things well.
He was ready to close his eyes soon after that. I read a little bit of Double Fudge by Judy Blume (He loves that series!), let the audio book version take over, and his tired little body did the rest.
You made a good choice, kiddo! Let’s try to be in bed even earlier tomorrow.
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