Every time I think I'm out, they suck me right back in

Saturday night, my wife went up to see her mother and her sisters as an early Mother's day thing. While she was gone, Oliver and I spent some quality time together. We did some Mother's day shopping, played in the park, had dinner, and then I went to put him down for the night.

Now Oliver has had mixed success with the whole toddler bed concept. Some nights he spends the whole night there. Sometimes he starts out there and joins us in the middle of the night. And sometimes he never makes it there. Also, some nights it takes a longer period in order to get him down. Sometimes it's twenty minutes. Sometimes it's an hour. Considering that mommy usually takes care of bed time, I thought I might be in a world of hurt.

We started with books. We read through six or seven of them. And when I say "read," I generally mean that Oliver flipped through the pages looking at the pictures and pointing out the ones that he knows. "Dog." "Cat." "Truck." "Sheep." Meanwhile I'm trying to talk about the pages before he flips to the next one. Some books we have to go through a couple of times before he's satisfied and some books I start the opening lines and he puts them away. Sandra Boynton does really well with "Doggies," but not so well with "Hippos Go Berserk" or "But Not the Armadillo."

After we finish with book time, it becomes Night Night time. This is an indeterminate period where we gently encourage him to lie down and go to sleep on his bed. His job in this period is to resist sleep in any manner possible, getting drinks of water, getting out of bed, and getting into a standing position on his bed. Eventually he winds down and settles into bed.

So I've finally gotten him to settle into bed and I'm about to do my silent Castaway impression and slink out of the room when he reverses out of a perfectly acceptable sleeping position in his bed to curl up in my arms. Houston, we have a problem. Ok, I think, no problem. I'll just hold him for a minute to let him settle and then place him back in bed. A minute later, he's back in bed and I'm about to cast off when the reversal happens. Two minutes later, he's back in bed and the reversal happens. At this point I have a sneaking suspicion that he's just not destined for the toddler bed and so I pick him up and lie down on my bed. He crawls off of me and into a perfect sleeping position on the bed. Out like a light.

You win some. You lose some. But regardless of his end sleeping destination, I have made Sleep!