Liam usually sleeps through the night – he has for a very long time. We’re really quite lucky, really – in fact, I often have to wake him up at 7:30, 8 AM in order to get him to school and myself to work on time. The exception has been if he had to go to the bathroom, but just in the last couple of weeks, he’s even figured out how to do that by himself at night (although, humorously, he simply cannot seem to figure out how to close his bedroom door – he either slams it shut, somehow jamming it so it’s super hard to open again, or it just doesn’t shut at all).
But last night, I awoke, adrenaline pumping, to the sound of Liam screaming my name, sobbing unconsolably. I rushed out of bed to his room, expecting – expecting I don’t know what – mostly that he’d injured himself, or had an accident, or fallen out of bed. But I certainly did not expect what the cause of his distress was. Liam takes a different toy to bed every night. One of his favourites is a “Mack” truck (from the movie Cars). The emergency at 4:45 this morning? He’d woken up, and the cab of the toy had become separated from the trailer (it is supposed to be able to do this), and he couldn’t get it to fit back together properly. I really didn’t know whether to laugh or get angry, but, given how intensely unhappy he was, the answer was neither – I put Mack back together, gave Liam a hug until he calmed down again, then went back to bed.