Perched

Benett has a mind of his own. Sometimes that little mind decides that there is no way he's going to go to sleep. We'll negotiate. We'll plead. We'll bribe. But when his little mind is set on something... none of these techniques work.

He'll creep up the stairs as quiet as can be, to see what kind of fun stuff is going on after he's been tucked into bed.

Some nights he's really quiet and we don't know that Benett's up until he walks around the couch and scares us. Other times, if I'm tapping away on my computer in an otherwise quiet room, I'll hear some rustling on the stairs. That's when I say something like, "Whoever is on the stairs had better get back into bed!"

The usual response to my statement is a tiny little voice saying, "Mamma, I just want to kiss you goodnight." (He knows I'm a sucker for that kind of thing.)

But on this night, he knew there was no getting around the fact that I was mad. So, he hunkered down and eventually gave in to a precarious place to sleep. Like some kind of mountain goat, he looked perfectly comfortable perched on the middle of the staircase.

I did consider leaving him there, just to save him the trip back up the stairs, in the middle of the night... that's when he usually crawls into bed with me... But I decided to take what I could get, and enjoy the satisfaction of tucking this little boy into bed, enjoying the fact that he wouldn't be following me back up the steps.