Dear Jayna,

Much has happened in the past eight months, and you have become quite the little firecracker. But enough about all of that. Let us talk at great length about your sleeping arrangements and related matters, shall we?

As chronicled here recently, you have finally graduated from the crib to a big-girl bed … a move we were able to delay for you much longer than for your super-sized brother, who outgrew the crib about a week after he was born.

And, though I’ve already covered this elsewhere, I would be remiss if I did not point out here that your move to a big-girl bed coincided with a far more earth-shattering development: Operation Release the Pahpiece.

Your pacifier (a.k.a. “pahpiece”) has been like another member of our family these past few years—and a mostly unwelcome one, if you ask me. Bad enough we have to keep track of you and your brother all the time, but at least we have a vested interest in your survival, since Zan’s professional baseball career is going to fund our retirement, and your sense of compassion and gratitude will compel you to care for your mother and I as we become old and crotchety and infirm. Having to constantly know the whereabouts of an aquamarine-colored rubber plug, however, ranks right up there on the “Screw that” list.

If I had a nickel for every time your mother and I asked each other, “Have you seen pahpiece?,” Zan wouldn’t need to get a baseball scholarship.

If I had a quarter for every time I had to crawl around on my hands and knees in your bedroom late at night or during the wee hours of the morning to find pahpiece after it fell out of your crib, you wouldn’t have to care for us in our old age, because we’d be able to hire a full-time team of nurses and caretakers.

And if I had a dollar for every time I, while searching our house or car for pahpiece, rattled off in my head or muttered under my breath a litany of obscenities that would make a truck driver blush, Bill Gates would be the world’s second-wealthiest man.

HOWEVER …

While I expected there to be a number of moments during which you’d miss having your pahpiece, I didn’t predict that there would also be a number of moments during which I’d miss having your pahpiece … but when you get upset now, the pahpiece is not there, and cannot be used to sedate you like a big fat shot of morphine. Instead, we must endure the much-discussed Screaming, which now goes on for longer than it did back in the days when we had the option of plugging up the hole from whence it comes.

BUT …

One of the reasons I most wanted to banish pahpiece in recent months was the fact that you constantly would talk with it in your mouth, which made understanding you impossible at worse, and annoying at best. I wanted to be able to actually hear what my daughter was saying, and marvel at the development of her verbal skills. And, just as I expected, you have developed quite a vocabulary, and are very well-spoken. It is such a welcome change to hear your words clearly as they leave your mouth unobstructed.

HAVING SAID THAT …

Please stop talking. Not completely … just some of the time. We can start small; just 60 brief seconds of silence would be delightful.

It is as though your pahpiece was one of those restraining bolts that the jawas fused to C-3PO and R2-D2 in order to keep them from escaping, and now that we’ve pried it off of you, you’re playing back that message from Princess Leia on an endless loop. (Too much geek speak, ladies? Because it appears roughly 99.9% of my readership is female, which I wasn’t expecting; I thought I’d be able to just whip off “Star Wars” references at will and not wonder if the audience knew what I was talking about. So, if that last passage didn’t make much sense to you, let me sum it up: the child has diarrhea of the mouth, and I have not yet discovered a speech-impeding equivalent of Immodium AD.)

In all seriousness, though: it really is wonderful to hear you speaking so well and so clearly, and without sounding like a 3-year-old who is constantly chomping on a monster cigar.

But about the bed: perhaps one of the drawbacks of having you sleep in a crib for so long is that you are now extremely agile and mobile, which are wonderful attributes … except for the fact that, through years of conditioning, you have come to believe that big, careless movements while sleeping or semi-awake are no problem, because the crib and its nice, soft bumper will prevent you from accidentally performing any aerial acrobatics. Not so with the bed, which you—and we—recently discovered in the middle of the night.

Your sleep pattern had been disrupted by the move from the crib to the bed, which we anticipated, so we weren’t surprised when you started waking in the 5 o’clock hour and calling in a long, slow whine for Mommy. But, a couple of weeks ago, in the middle of the night, you started screaming for her rapidly and with real distress in your voice, so even though I was your second choice (if at all), I leapt out of bed and practically flew up the stairs. When I opened the door to your room, I saw a scene that upset me greatly, and that probably has left you somewhat traumatized.

Apparently, you had sat up in bed, gotten on your knees, placed your hands on the guard rail and started working your way toward the end of the bed when—oh shit!—the guard rail ended, and you fell face first out of the bed. Thankfully, your face didn’t hit the floor … because your feet and ankles were wrapped up in the bedding. Thus, when I arrived, you were hanging upside down with your head on the floor and your feet tangled in the sheet and comforter. I remember saying “Oh no!” and scooping you up in my arms, which I could tell comforted you greatly, because you continued screaming for Mommy.

A few nights ago, I was noticing on the baby monitor that you were doing a lot of squirming around and frequently changing positions, so I went up to check on you a couple of times. The first time, you were lying horizontally on the bed, your hands touching one of the side guardrails, your feet touching the other. I placed you back in the traditional head-on-the-pillow position, to which you apparently are allergic.

When I checked on you again before I went to bed myself, you were again lying horizontally, but this time you were at the end of the bed. Had you done another half roll in the wrong direction, you’d have plummeted to the floor.

I briefly considered tossing the bed out the window and reassembling the crib, but I instead decided to place you back at the head of the bed, and then proceeded to tuck you in as tightly as I could without suffocating you or cutting off the circulation to your head.

Fast-forward to 1:30 a.m., and again you are screaming for Mommy, and again I am leaping out of the bed and clearing the stairs like an Olympic athlete.

You hadn’t fallen out of the bed again. No, this time, you had taken my tuck-you-in-tightly solution and, in that magical way that only a child can, turned it into a Super Shitty Idea.

Oftentimes, when we would place you in your crib lying on your stomach, you would push yourself down the length of the mattress until your feet were pressed against the foot of the crib. You did a similar thing in your bed the other night, but because I had done such a spectacular job of tucking in your sheet and comforter, you essentially ended up trapped underneath them at the foot of your bed, and when you awoke, you were enveloped in darkness and bedding and had no idea how to get out.

And so, really, given the two incidents described above, plus an episode last night during which you woke up crying and told me that you didn’t want to sleep in your bed, and that you miss your crib, I am rather tempted to say “Fuck this shit” and put you in a crib, or toddler bed, or dog crate, or whatever will increase the likelihood of me getting a full night’s sleep.

When Zan graduated from the crib, he moved to a fire-engine-themed toddler bed, which was just a slight step above being a crib itself; it was almost impossible for him to fall out of it. You, however, wanted to jump right to a twin bed, and we figured we might as well go with it, since it would allow us to avoid buying and assembling a transitional bed that we’d just have to disassemble and discard within a year or two. Now, however, I’m beginning to think the cost and the hassle would have been well worth it, given that, a month into the bed experiment, you are still whacked out from the change.

OK, enough about The Bed. Let’s end on a positive note: school.

After having a really difficult time adjusting to school, you are doing terrific—so much so that you now let Mommy or Daddy say goodbye to you at the school entrance instead of insisting under the threat of a full-on meltdown that we accompany you inside and upstairs to hang your coat.

The change in procedure was forced upon you; I was dropping you off a few weeks ago, and you again had rebuffed my suggestion that you let one of your teachers take you up. “I want you to take me upstairs,” you told me as I drove you to school. But when we arrived, there were several parents and kids and teachers all bunched up at the entrance, and one of your teachers whom I particularly trust reached across the threshold to take your hand, and, by gum, I let her take it, and said goodbye to you, and you tried to pull away from her and began crying and saying “No, I want you to come with me!” but I didn’t; I let her pick you up, and the door closed, and I turned and walked back to the car feeling like I had just betrayed you and handed you over to the keeper of the gallows pole.

But when I got home, I called the school to check on whether you’d recovered, and I was told you were smiling and enjoying a presentation from a firefighter who was visiting your class, and when I came to pick you up, you were chipper as could be.

It was Mommy’s turn to take you to school the following time, and you let her hand you off at the door, as well … and that is how it has gone now for the past couple of weeks.

I guess that’s as good a metaphor as any for summing up where you’re at right now: you’re crossing thresholds, and we’re trying to help you cross them—even when helping sometimes means getting you to cross on your own.

So, the frequent ear-piercing screams and crying fits and nightly nerve-wracking shenanigans with your bed not withstanding, you are a delight. Really.

Oh, I almost forgot: there is something about your bed that I do love. It’s big enough for me to lay beside you when I read to you at bedtime … and often when I’m doing so, you will roll toward me and wrap your little arms around my neck and kiss me on the cheek and say “I love you, Daddy.” And it’s a good thing there’s a mattress protector beneath the sheets, because that’s when I melt into a big puddle of happiness.

I love you too, Princess.

Love,

Daddy

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