I’m not usually the  bedtime guy. After being with me all day, Max wants 100% mom time, from the moment she walks in the door until the lights go off at night, so she gets the lion’s share of bedtimes. But I try to do one or two a week. You would think I would be gung-ho and enthusiastic to do bedtime when it’s my shift, but there’s some small sense of dread that shows up instead.

A part of it is the little dude’s reaction to finding out I’m the bedtime guy that night. When he’s really tired, a great caterwauling shrieks out of his small body, assaulting the ears and emotions of both my wife and me. I figured out a few weeks ago that the misery only lasts until we start heading upstairs, and at that point, he accepts that this is inevitable and the tears magically vanish. So that’s not the main issue.

And the actual bedtime routine is pretty nice and easy. Tonight it took 40 minutes from tearful ascent to fully asleep. During that time, we read 4 books together while he ate his bedtime snack. He cheerfully brushed his teeth, and that used to be a battle just a few months ago, so there’s another sign of his mom’s great parenting skills. If it had  been left to me, the boy would have very fuzzy teeth. After brushing his teeth and giving his face a wipe, we went back into his room, and he happily turned off the light and snuggled into bed. After 5 minutes of lying in the dark beside him, he fell fast asleep. So when you look at it, there’s nothing unpleasant about the routine itself.

I suspect that the majority of my bedtime avoidance is rooted in memories of previous bad nights. There was a time where the very mention of bed time would lead to an unstoppable howling from a boy who would actively resist all attempts to put on pajamas. And when he was still in his crib, the battle to lull him to sleep and keep him asleep made me a nervous wreck. I was perpetually on edge, desperately hoping that he wouldn’t wake up after bedtime. I do not fondly remember those times.

So, long story short: the young man is wonderful and  pretty good at going to bed, and I have to remember that. On an unrelated note, we measured his height today and he’s 41 inches tall. Holy moley. He is more than half my height.

As a guy, I have no experience in dealing with long-term, complicated emotional reactions. For a man, most emotions are created by a single moment of stress and are dealt with. Problem happens, man thinks about problem,man bashes head against problem until it goes away. It’s not elegant, but it does the trick.

But this new category of emotion, the unresolvable kind, is quite a different story. The signs of the little dude’s increasing maturity and the looming inevitable separation that will happen as he gets older is the thing I’m still dealing with. Today, the trigger was the idea of his eating lunch at school. For some reason, I was saddened by the notion that we wouldn’t be eating lunch together for those 3 days a week. Lunch, for the love of pete. A couple of weeks ago we watched Toy Story 3 as a family, and it was a fantastic experience, but when Andy drove off for college and waved goodbye to his toys, I was snuffling and trying to keep it together. There’s nothing wrong with a dude crying, but on the flip side, I really didn’t want to explain why daddy was sad during a very happy family moment.

So I guess the key is that you end up dealing with the separation sadness one step at a time. You acclimatize to each change with some moping or overeating or weeping, whatever gets you by, and you put your brave face back on and greet them with a cheery smile when they come back.So bring on the 3 full days at preschool next year, then 5 days a week at kindergarten the year after that, and on and on.

The rules around the house are pretty lax. We go with the flow of things and if that means sometimes we eat dinner watching tv as a family, then so be it. I think I ate at the dining room table as a child for at least a few years, but we gradually migrated to the couches, so now eating at the table feels a little odd to me. We try to eat dinner at the dinner table, but we don’t always make it there. Such is life.

There are a core of unbendable rules, rules that I enforce with a stern and unrelenting authority: no hitting, no pinching, no kicking, no hurting of any kind. And of course, the little dude will test the absolute nature of these rules. There are timeouts assigned for these infractions, but I’ve also included a secondary punishment: I throw away a treat.

We have a fairly ample supply of somewhat healthy treats, like gummi bears made out of fruit juice, and there are occasional influxes of junk food that come into the house one way or another and are doled out in meagre portions to the excitable young man. And oh does he love his treats. So, when he chooses to deliberately cause harm to someone, I hit ’em where it hurts, and I throw a treat into the garbage. It’s a third strike punishment, because I always give him a couple of chances to rethink his bad choices, but if he is still choosing to strike someone, then I head towards the treat cupboard. And the wailing that rises from this poor tiny soul!

I decided to start doing this as a lesson about permanent consequences, and hopefully it also sends the message that yummy snacks aren’t automatically supplied for a boy regardless of his behaviour. It’s all about the choices he makes, and what happens when he chooses to be naughty.

Someday, he will realize that I only throw out a small portion of a treat he doesn’t actually like, so the actual loss to him is negligible. I’m not sure what I’ll do that day.