the man I married

A week from last Friday night, sometime in the AM, crying from the crib. The kind of wailing that means my baby is not going to put himself back to sleep this time.
After four weeks of Nicholas sleeping through the night, I'd finally relearned how to sleep through the night myself, and it felt like part of me has actually forgotten how to function deep in the dark hours of the night. But this waking was part of a series; Nicholas had been waking and crying for no apparent reason for two nights in a row now.
Was he teething? The motrin didn't seem to make a difference.
Even though I knew he wasn't hungry, I'd gotten past the point of worrying about messing up his ability to go all night without eating, and I'd tried feeding him a few hours ago-he went back to sleep, but now
he was awake again.

I slipped into Nicholas's room. He was standing in his crib, and when he saw me, his mid-level wails turned into panicked excitement. I picked him up over the rails, checked him over, hoping to find something bothering him so I could fix it and we could both go back to sleep.
But his skin was slightly cool, his pacifier in his mouth and his back-up pacifier within easy reach from the crib, his blankets wrapped around his legs; no easy fix this time.

So we sat in the rocking chair and I rocked. And rocked. And rocked. He would get to where he was just about asleep, and then he'd twist and turn and arch his back and kick his legs hard against the armrest of the rocking chair, bouncing himself and me in his quiet agitation. And we'd start the calming down falling asleep process over.

An hour (maybe?) later, no progress. So maybe he just needed sleep training again. I was not excited about the prospect of simply listening to him cry himself to sleep, but what other option did I have? I kissed his now slightly sweaty head and placed him back in the crib, then went back to bed, where I sat, unable to sleep to the sound of Nicholas's angry cries.

Of course, Kent wasn't asleep anymore at this point either. He raised up on one elbow in bed and looked at me in the darkness.

"Will you go try to help him?" I mumbled to Kent. "His extra binky is on the well the right there, ahh, you know where it is." I was more tired than I had thought.
Kent stood slowly and made his way into Nicholas's room. After a few more moments, Nicholas's cries turned to whimpers turned to silence. In an unbelievably short amount of time, Kent was back, crawling into bed next to me.
"What did you do? How did you get him to fall asleep?" I mean, I'd tried everything, hadn't I?
Kent shrugged. "I turned off his nightlight. He was acting like it was bothering him. As soon as it was off he calmed down, his heart rate slowed, and I laid him down and he went right back to sleep."

Never, ever would I have thought to turn off the nightlight that has been on every night since Nicholas was born. But Kent figured it out, and since then, we've had no nightlight and no night wakings.

There's something special about he way that Kent relates to Nicholas. He's gentle, observant, I would even say in-tune with what Nicholas needs and wants in a way that I don't know if I can be.
And that is one of the reasons I fell in love with this man. I knew he would be a good daddy.
I just didn't realize how good.