Nickell’s Bag

Tonight I put my two-year-old son Jules to bed. Within 20 minutes after I left his room, he had (more or less silently, just with a few quiet comments about how he wasn’t ready to go to bed) turned off his sound machine and turned on his light and he was messing around in his room. After about another half-hour he softly said my name. I decided to go ahead and go in there. He said he wanted to come downstairs. I said no, it’s bedtime, let’s lie down again and turn off the light. He was okay with that. I laid down next to him, and started talking to him quietly.

“It’s time to go to sleep so that you can dream about Jorge [our dog], and you guys find a big castle with ice cream on top, and you climb up and up and up the stairs to the top of the castle, and you eat all the ice cream, then you slide down a big slide that goes all the way to the ground, and you can feel the wind in your hair and see the big bright sun in the sky, and you get down to the ground, and…”

Jules interrupts.

“…and we see a big nice hippumapotumus there, and we get on him and ride him around on the ground, and then we go back up in the castle in the sky, and we eat some ice cream, and then we slide down the big slide in the sky, and we find a big rhinosumus, and he’s very nice and big, and we pet him, and then we eat a hot dog with him.”

How do I compete with that?

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