Couple of nights ago, I can't remember how long, but not too long ago, Josh and I had one of our 'routine' conversations during bed time (picked the picture simply because it showed Josh sleeping). Josh has slowly degraded to needing a little more 'attention' at bed time. Before, our bed time ritual was pretty straight forward... bath, lotion, brush teeth/hair, read 1 or 2 books while drinking a bottle of milk, then put him to bed and walk out of the room. It has slowly morphed into something a bit more 'entertaining' for Josh.

Ritual now includes watching TV, preferrably Bull Riding - "that bull looks MEAN!" is Josh's favorite saying, while drinking the bottle. Then we go back to read a book or two. So he's finagled his way to get an extra 15-25 minutes of staying awake. Then, after reading books we have to lay with him in his bed for a little bit. I've managed to keep this to 5 minutes at the most then explaining I have to go 'help' Mom or something to get me out of the room. Well, this works for the majority of the time, but about 15% of the time, it takes a bit more 'massaging' before I can leave. And even less frequent, maybe 5% of the time, Josh will wake up/start balling/screaming for 'I want my Daddy' and when he does that most of the time he really got scared and needs to be cuddled with a bit (I say most of the time b/c sometimes he does it just to get me down there and he doesn't appear shaken up or anything - sneaky little bastage).

So the night that I'm referring to, after we did our little 'lay in bed' ritual I was going to leave and Josh was sitting 'up'. For some reason, he threw his head/body back expecting it to land on the pillow, but he miscalculated the distance. Instead of playfully landing on the bed/pillow, there was an enormous CRACK as his head hit the panelling/wall in his build in bunk beds. It is actually the wall that you 'can't' see in this picture but you get the idea. So as you parents of young children know, when an 'injury' like that happens and there is complete silence, you know it's bad. It is silent because Josh was in such shock and pain that he couldn't even breath, lol. He had tears streaming out, his mouth was wide open, but he was like a frozen statue...no sound. Then after he remembered that he wanted to cry, he took the one massive deep breath and let out a blood curtling scream.

"OK, looks like I'm gonna be down here a bit longer," I thought to myself. I immediately grabbed Josh and tried to comfort him, but he was having none of it. He had screaming to do...the kind of screaming that wakes up a neighborhood. Mom came rushing in, actually from the sound of his head hitting the wall and not the scream. Josh temporarily wanted to be held by Mommy, but then wanted to come back to me after she calmed him down. So he came back to me and uttered his famous words that always stop me in my tracks.

"Snuggle with me Daddy." So I told him I'd lay with him a few more minutes. Now as I said, the way he says "Want to snuggle Daddy" is 'bad' enough in the fact that I can never resist, but his actions are even worse - and sneaky at that. As we lay in bed, every time I wiggle just a bit, hinting that I might be getting up, Josh quickly puts a hand on me, snuggles up in a spoon position and 'smoothly' says "Snuggle Daddy", then goes back to laying down/playing with blankie/or whatever else he was doing. He does it in a matter as if he's the one doing me a favor by snuggling, lol. As I've said before, he's got Mom and Dad wrapped around his finger sometimes, and this is one of the times he knows it. (I can only imagine how bad it will be with Audrey)

So after 2-3 failed attempts at leaving the room, I finally tell Josh, "Josh, I have to leave and do some work. You try to go to sleep and I will come back in 5 minutes to check on you." Note that it is almost 9:45pm already, so I figured he'd finally just fall asleep and I went to work in my office. After about 30 minutes of working, I figured I better turn on the monitor to make sure he's sleeping and I was a bit shocked at what I heard. Josh was just sitting there in his bed, talking in his whisper voice (ask Val how much she likes that voice), "Daddy check on me in fiiiiiivvvvve minutes. Daddy coming back in fiiiiivvvve minutes" over and over again. I half wanted to let him keep going to see how long it would go but knowing Josh, I was afraid he'd keep at it well past midnight. So I went back in the room to tell him to go to sleep now. As I opened the door...

"Snuggle Daddy," Josh said in his 'comforting/consoling' tone as if I'd come back because I needed a little loving. I just shook my head and replied,

"2 minutes Josh, I'll snuggle for 2 minutes."

"Yep!" Josh was quick to reply, as if he knew it all along, and assumed the spoon position waiting for me to crawl into bed with him.