While You Sleep

You drive me bonkers sometimes, little ones. Oh, I love you with every ounce of my being, that’s a given, but there are moments when I feel I could send you to “live with the fairies”, as my own mother would sometimes say. You push buttons like no one else can. You have wild moments and loud moments and destructive moments. All three of you have a sense of timing your insanity perfectly with my grumpiest days, my pit-of-despair days, my hormones-raging-out-of-control days. Yet even in those moments, even on those days when I could pull my hair out because you have made your brother cry for the eleventh time, and your sister has left construction paper clippings all over the floor and you have argued over the same dang toy for 47 minutes, I still adore you all.

One of your saving graces is that I tiptoe into each of your rooms every night long after lights-out time and watch you sleep. The light from the hallway reaches across the floor and illuminates your perfect, smooth little cheeks and highlights the eyelashes of your blessedly-closed eyes. Your chests rise and fall in perfect rhythm with your sweet childhood dreams. You each sleep just as you have since you were infants – one with arms flung high above his head, one with a hand tucked under his cheek and one on his belly, and one on her side, scrunched up like a snail and surrounded by dolls and stuffed animals. In these moments of watching you sleep, I can let go of the bad parts of the day and focus on how perfectly wonderful you are in your imperfections.

Will I ever tire of watching you sleep? My heart swells with love and joy every night, knowing that you are safe and warm and loved, and hopefully dreaming the innocent and lovely dreams that only children are privy to. I even miss you when you are sleeping at times. I get the urge to hold you, to hug you, to hear your sweet little voice that will someday change and never be the same as it is now. Maybe that’s the reason I cherish these slumbering moments so much – I realize how quickly you are changing, but while you sleep, you are still my babies.

So dream on, little ones.