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I'm just about to drift into sleep when I hear, "Mama! The bee!" I turn to my 2-year-old son, Kirby, in the bed next to me. He had been almost asleep, too. There is no bee. Days ago, he saw a bee in the pool, and he can't stop talking about it. My husband looks at me from the other side of the bed, and we both crack up.
We know it's one of those moments we'll remember, which is part of the reason we've ceded the middle of our bed to a toddler.
When Kirby was a baby, past the infant stage but still in a crib in his bedroom, we did some general combo of "cry it out" sleep training and middle-of-the-night soothing. But once we switched to the toddler bed, his ability to run out of the room and articulate his anguish when we leave — "Mama, Dada, no go!" — proved too much for us.
We alternated nights reading "Little Blue Truck" and "Goodnight Moon," playing with his glow-in-the-dark Ninja Turtles, coaxing him to lie down, playing music, stroking his head, whispering dreams into his ear. It was lovely. It also took freaking forever.
Most nights, he would come thundering into our room around 2 a.m. and clambered into the bed. We were too exhausted to protest by then.
We were in this semi-acceptable rhythm when my BFF and her 7-year-old son came to visit for a weekend, and we set up an air mattress in Kirby's room for them. We told him he got to have a sleepover with Mom and Dad and Dogga (his name for our 12-pound terrier-chihuahua mix, Arthur, who takes up as much room as an adult human), and he grinned, clapped his hands, and hopped into the bed.
That was a few months ago, and he's never left.
Sharing a bed, even a king-sized one, with a toddler is a test of how many times one can tolerate being kicked in the face. Arthur, being small, will snap at anyone who jostles him under the covers. Kirby will be on the verge of sleep and then suddenly start reciting the names of the Ninja Turtles loudly and with great vigor.
But we love it.
Bedtime can still be a battle, but it's a family battle. We watch old 90s cartoons, read books, wrestle (he loves it when his dad "power bombs" him, WWF-modified-for-toddlers style), sing songs, and then settle in, all four of us. There's not nearly as much crying.
Once Kirby is asleep, my husband and I quietly chat or play games on our phones or read by booklight. Sometimes, we'll slip out of bed and decamp to the living room to have an actual adult evening.
More often than not, though, we go to sleep, too. I stop scrolling and just relax in the dark, my sweet son nestled next to me, sharing my pillow, hand outstretched to hold his dad's on the other side of the bed. If he has a nightmare, I can easily calm him with a back rub. And I don't set an alarm anymore because I reliably wake up to a small hand patting my cheek while he shout-whispers, "Mama!".
This phase, like all phases of too-fleeting childhood, won't last forever. We joke that we should AirBnb Kirby's bedroom in the meantime. Sometimes, I worry that we're setting him, and us, up for a tougher transition later on when it's time for him to sleep on his own.
But right now, co-sleeping with our toddler means everyone in our family gets more and better sleep, we get to spend more time with our son, and we'll never miss an important update about the bee.
