I’m trying to get the Boy out of his nighttime diaper. I’m very relaxed about it, but I’ve started taking the first steps: cutting down his liquid intake before bed, getting him out of proper diapers and into training diapers so he can go to the bathroom by himself at night, and generally discussing how he’s a big boy now and is allowed to and should start thinking about getting up and peeing in the toilet now. Though I’m not in any big rush these first simple steps have already garnered some results… the Boy now has an excuse to get up and walk around at night. This basically means that after I’ve whispered the last “good night, I love you miles and miles”, indication that it is, in fact, bedtime, he manages to get up between five and ten more times every single night. Half the time I have to tuck him back in. It’s pretty annoying. Most of the time.

Today he’d been complaining that I hadn’t cuddled him enough. He’s probably right, his sister demands cuddles, if I’m sitting down she’ll just climb into my lap pushing out of her way anything that could impede her progress, he, on the other hand, tends to keep to his own space. He’ll take cuddles when offered, but he rarely comes asking. And tonight he complained of this evident inequality between them, though I constantly try to keep things even.

These two things are related of course, the peeing and the cuddles, because tonight on one of the thousand trips to the bathroom he came by my room and stupidly I didn’t ask him to come lie in my bed for a couple of minutes, as I usually do, I sent him packing straight away. And so I heard grumbling all the way back to bed and felt guilty. Luckily.

I went to lie with him in his bed a few minutes. And as we snuggled I said to him, you know baby, you’re so special to me because you were my first, you made me a mama. I wasn’t a mama until you came. And he said: you weren’t a mama? With surprised wonder in his voice, because, how can one conceive of such a thing. And I said: I wasn’t a mama until you came, I waited for you such a long time, I was afraid you weren’t going to come and then you did and I was so happy. And then I kissed him, and left. And he fell asleep.