Apples of the night
The toddler version of "the unsleeping baby" looks like this, for Tabitha (who has taken the mantle over gladly; at 4 now, Ev mostly sleeps, although many nights a chunk of that sleeping still happens beside me): at somewhere around quarter-to-five (or -to-four, or once to-two), she comes in whinging about nursing, even though she knows what my answer is going to be.
Reluctantly, she crawls into bed and nestles in next to my closed shirt. Then she kicks and wriggles, and then she declares that she's hungry, and then I get up and go downstairs to bring her an apple. It's not enough to have it--it also has to have the stem twisted off and a significant bite taken out first, so she doesn't have to be the one to break the skin. If the bite is too small, she'll protest: "that's not like the ocean!" Once satisfied with the offering, she'll settle down into the dark beside me for a while--in our bed if she gets there first, or in the office with me if Evanny is already asleep beside Matt in the master. Then she'll ask me to get back up and get her her water bottle (well, she declares the need for water anyway--she'd gladly go herself, but then she'll squirrel around in the bedroom and end up waking her sister). Then she'll settle back down, alternating sips with crisp crunches, and if we're lucky, we both get to fall asleep like that for a while before Matt's alarm insists it's time for coffee pots and picking out preschooler clothes. There are lots of nostalgic little scents and sounds associated with the bedtime world of early childhood: sweet cheese breath, sighs and sniffles, diaper lotions, lavender baby-Vicks, lullabies, the syrup flavors of vitamins and children's Tylenol, but apples, the crunch and fragrance of them, were never something I expected to be a memory-bridge to baby sleep. Yet despite how it's too damn early, always, and I never get as much sleep as I want, despite how I say I can't wait until they sleep at night, despite how ridiculously impossible it ought to be to fall asleep with someone chewing apples in your ears... it turns out that's a lovely sound-and-scent combination to have beside one on the pillow, especially accompanied by the warm little tumble of tiny limbs, little knees and feet curled into my arm and side, little cold, wet, juice-flavored hands grabbing my head for a fierce snuggling hug in the darkness, cold, sticky little sugared lips planting a firm tiny kiss on mine. Because this child, she holds it back until she's ready, but when she's ready, she lavishes her love. And there's nothing like a sweet, dark apple lavishing.