Ni-night.

Our little girl – all grown up (sob).

Jessie put herself to bed tonight.

All by herself.

Usually each of the adults takes a kid and reads a few books to her, gives the kid a sippy cup of water (they don’t usually drink the whole cup, just a few sips), and the kidlette sits on our laps until they’re asleep.  They’ve gotten too heavy for me to stick into the cribs without dropping them and waking them up (I’m pretty short and can barely reach over the side of the cribs. I have to climb a stool and then I’m too high to lower them in) so Matt will put his kid to bed then come stick mine in bed (if she’s asleep ).  We’ve been thinking that sooner or later they’ll be able to climb out of the cribs and we’ll need to do the toddler beds, but it’s nice to have them contained and not have to worry about them, so at 22 months, they’re still in cribs.

More than the whole bed/crib thing, we’ve been wondering how they’ll deal with the transition from falling asleep on someone’s lap, reading a book, to getting tucked into bed and having one of us sit in their room reading a book to both of them.

My guess is it might go smoother than we anticipated.

Tonight Matt took Jessie upstairs to go to bed. (Jessie goes to sleep upstairs in our room on the green recliner. Whoever has Sam sits in the living room with her. This week Matt has Jessie and I have Sam at bedtime.) They got upstairs and she went right into the nursery, climbed the stool that I had sitting by Sam’s crib, flipped herself into Sam’s crib, held up her hand to stop Matt from picking her up, said, “niiii-niiii” and waved good-bye to him.  Matt asked if she wanted to go read a book and have some water. She said “no, niiii-niiiii” and laid down.

Matt waited outside the door for a while, didn’t hear anything, and finally decided that he would put Sam to bed and I could do the dishes and make our supper.  Jessie never made a peep after she kicked Matt out of the room.

Sweet.

I’m sure that won’t happen on a regular basis, but it was nice to get a break and have just one of us putting a kid to bed for the first time in almost two years.  I don’t know about Matt, but it makes me a whole lot more eager to reach the point where one of us tucks them into their little toddler beds and reads a book to them while the other adult does the dishes. (And, hopefully by that time, we’ll have figured out how to eat supper with them on a more regular basis, so that the dish-washing parent doesn’t also have to make supper.)

Niiiiiiii-niiiiiiiiiiiii.