Levon, Levon! (and funny sleep stories)
Jenson isn’t the easiest to put to sleep at night. He’s not particularly difficult, but it takes an hour and he “needs” one of us to sit outside his door until he’s asleep. Sometimes he sings or talks to himself, sometimes (often) he wants us to sing to him, and other times, he wants to be rocked and sung to instead. At least when we are outside his door we can be sit and be on our phones – he usually just checks in with us now and then to make sure we are there.
Lately he’s wanted to be sung to for most of the time (at least on my nights). I got through a variety of songs – just whatever I can think of all of the words to that night. Several are consistent though (Levon, Blackbird, Godspeed, I Will Take You Home, etc.). One that he’s obsessed with is Rock-a-bye Baby (“rockababy, rockababy?”). For awhile, he wanted it over and over again. I got tired of it, so I started substituting other names/things for “baby”, and he got a kick out of it. He always asks “Rockababy?”, and then when I start singing it, he says “cat, cat”, so I sing it as “Rock-a-bye cat, on the tree top…”. After each verse, he names someone or something else – he goes through several animals and people that we know (it varies on who). Tonight, I sung it with cat, pumpkin, and something else, and then he said “Levon”, so I laughed and started “Rockabye Levon, on the tree top”, and he started yelling – NO, Levon, Levon!
Turns out he wanted me to sing the song Levon (he never usually asks for anything specific, other than “more songs?”). And then he sung along with the chorus. It was awesome – he knew most of the words. I’m doing something right.
Also, we have successfully narrowed his crib animals down to 3 (monkey, giraffe, and puppy). It got out of hand for awhile with about 8 animals, that then had to be carried back downstairs in the morning. Now the rest sleep downstairs in his tent. One night I was outside his door before we narrowed the animals down, and he was talking to his animals. I looked on the monitor and he’d lined them all up. He laid down on one or something and said “Oh, sorry!”. It was so funny.
And my final story…one day before lunch he found the penguin mittens that my sister had knit him last year for winter and he was playing with them and wearing them. When I went to take him up for his nap, he was insisting on wearing them. Whatver…it wasn’t going to hurt anything. He slept with them on the entire nap. It was not a cold day.
