One tired doggo

The meaning behind my new tattoo.

The baby sleep course we took suggested that introducing a consistent bedtime routine around 3 months of age would lay the foundation for healthy sleep. It didn’t need to be long or complicated, but was best executed as a set of activities performed in the same order every night, in an effort to offer cues that it was time to go to sleep.

Desperate for sleep, we started the bedtime routine with our son at exactly 3 months. It went like this:

Playlist —> Bath —> Diaper —> Lotion —> Jammies —> Bottle —> Stories —> Song —> Bed

Naps were preceded by an abridged version of this sequence.

Three years later, it still mostly looks like this, but he has no patience for lotion, brushes his teeth instead of taking a bottle, and now he sings to us instead of the other way around. There’s also a new window of “quiet" play (which is hardly ever quiet) while his sister falls asleep in their shared room. Oh, and naps are usually accomplished by tricking him into getting cozy on the couch to watch a movie, where he usually passes out.

The baby sleep expert was right. I do believe this ritual helped him become a confident, adaptable, and relaxed sleeper, mostly because we were afforded the luxury of being consistent––something I became almost religious about after sleep training. I lived in fear that any misstep in the schedule or routine would send us back into the bowels of sleep deprivation.

I could be so hawkish with this routine because three months after it was implemented, the pandemic hit. Our already small world shriveled and, like every one else, we puttered around our homes day in and out. Weeks bled into one another, punctuated by this routine three times a day for two naps and one bedtime. Every time I’d stand up to shut the blackout curtains in his room I’d think, “Oh god, I’m here again already.”

Like most parents of small children, we read the same books over and over again––his interest, awareness, and preference growing with every month. One of these books was, “The Going To Bed Book,” by Sandra Boynton.

If you’re not familiar, she writes very absurd and adorable children’s books that feature animals doing odd things. I was able to string together some Google images to give you most of this asinine story:

Now, this makes no sense. And, that apparently drives some people crazy, according to the reviews on GoodReads.

Anyway, the poor dog sliding down the stairs always struck me. He looks simply overcome. THIS DOG CANNOT. He is D-O-N-E. Weirdly, he seems to be the only one feeling the gravity of the strange events that just transpired on the deck of this boat. Oh, also, they’re on a boat in the middle of the sea––important context.

“I am this dog,” I would think every time we read the book. The longer the pandemic slogged on, the more I related to this tired dog. He encapsulated everything about this strange period of time when I lived in an exhausting bubble with my baby and his routine, which without any structure to my own individual life, ultimately became my routine.

I started to think about this dog a lot, even when it wasn’t nap time or bed time––to the point where I would bring him up in conversation. “Ok, so all these animals are on a boat, and they get ready for bed. But there’s this one dog….” (Hey, we were all going out of our minds!)

It’s hard to believe, but I am so nostalgic for this difficult time. Sure, it was monotonous and terrifying, but it was also simple and sweet. I was just so present, all the time. I had no other choice. What a gift! Bedtime was the anchor to the day, truly one of the only signals of the passage of time. Eventually, it became an important ritual not just for my son, but for the entire family––all three of us, to the point where I now feel incomplete and not prepared to sleep if I have to miss the routine––which I try not to do.

As the world opened back up, our lives became fuller, and our family grew bigger, but bedtime remained a constant. We do the routine with our daughter now too. She folds right into the nightly production like a new co-star. It’s evolved to be more complicated and chaotic, but it’s still our daily north star.

I had wanted another tattoo for quite a while. It’s been six years since my last, and fifteen since my first. But, I kept getting pregnant and there was a pandemic. As MY third BIRTH day approached, it felt like a symbolic time to mark the first three years as a parent. Like all my tattoos, this one offers me a daily reminder of a particular point in my life that I don’t want to forget.

This dog represents everything about the first 2.5 years of parenting in a pandemic. When my daughter was born, I grieved our short-lived family of three that never had a chance to be in the world. But, maybe it’s nice that we never had to share, and most of our memories will always be just for us. It was all consuming, in the best and worst ways. We went through so much together, and I don’t ever want to forget what we were for a brief period of time––even if it was so hard, and left me comatose, sliding down an emotional staircase.

So now me and this dog are forever linked, as a silly reminder of the first years of motherhood, that I can do hard things, to take pleasure in the slowest of days, and that exercising after getting ready for bed is always a terrible, terrible idea.