The Perception of Doors

I have class on Wednesday nights, so I don't usually get home until 8 or 8:30. Most Wednesdays, I'm able to resist the temptation to look in on Samson for fear of waking him up. If I've learned anything in 15 months, it's this: "You don't wake a sleeping baby."

Can you guess what happened tonight? In my defense, he seems to have caught my head cold, and he just sounded so full of pathos (not to mention snot) wheezing away in there that I had to go in and check on him.

Sure enough, my eyes had barely adjusted to the light when up he popped. Apparently the vaporizer, in addition to helping him breathe, gives him crazy hair. He looked like a little blonde Tina Turner in feety PJs. I actually thought about trying to get a picture, but it seemed like waking him out of a sound sleep was enough for one night.

So there we are, Sam with his head on my shoulder and me, rasping out songs in my best stuffy head/trying to be quiet Tom Waits voice, when he sees the door. Suddenly, and unsurprisingly, all bets are off. He cries "doh, doh, doh" until I open it and we walk through, both of us blinking in the light of the hallway. We went through our nightly routine of saying goodnight to all the rooms and turning out the lights and got settled back in his room, where I spent the next hour trying to rock him back to sleep. Poor little guy. [Selfishly, I liked the extra time with him, but I'm sure he'd have been better served by simply sleeping without interruption.]

A footnote: Since Samson is still not walking, he likes to be picked up and carried around. This preference, coupled with this daily increasing vocabulary, makes me feel a little like the Blaster half of the Mad Max duo Master Blaster. He points a direction and issues a command, and I carry it out expeditiously. With a deal like this, why walk?