3:30AM

My Nook Simple Touch with Glowlight and I have bonded. I love it. Truly. Madly. Deeply. I have a tendency to stay up *way* too late reading but I also fully recognize this is my own d*mn fault and I fully accept the consequences. 

With a road trip planned for Friday night (a round-trip of 6 hours driving to be completed in one day), Thursday night was not the best night to choose to stay awake reading but there I was at 3:30AM, unable to shut off the Nook (*what's going to happen next????*) and vaguely startled by the door to the boys' bedroom opening. Immediately assuming someone has to pee, I also assume the footsteps will race down the hall to the bathroom. They do not. They pad quietly into my room, around my bed, and stop right in front of my face, on the other side of my Nook, and scare the crap out of me. 

In a perfectly calm, wide-awake voice, it's the 6yo:

"Um, mom, can I borrow your backscratcher?" I am speechless. I'm also in a bit of a fog since I've been unexpectedly dragged out of my book zone and back into parent zone. And I suppose I expected I don't feel good or something hurts or my brother's snoring but definitely not I need your backscratcher. Which looks like this:

I bought it at World Market. It's on my list of Best Purchases Ever.

and is typically on my nightstand. Which undoubtedly explains why it was my side of the bed he chose to approach (I will later discover that's not entirely true). 

The backscratcher is not on my nightstand. I offer to go get it for him and send him back to bed. Back scratching delivered, he curls back up in the pile of Guys in his bed and I am guessing goes back to sleep.

Fast forward a bit: yesterday morning we dropped off the 12yo to go to Boy Scout camp in Wisconsin. A week of merit badge classes, dirt, and hopefully more than one change in underwear. We get him back in 6 days. 

The 6yo is ecstatic in some ways: at breakfast yesterday, the 12yo grudgingly agreed to let the 6yo sleep in his bed, the Top Bunk, while he's gone. I had to agree to wash the sheets (and we all know how much I enjoy putting sheets on the Top Bunk) and point out that it's no different than when he wants to sleep in our bed when we're gone and Mimi stays here. FINE. 

I was not Parent on Duty for bedtime last night so I can't say for sure but I *think* that the 6yo went to sleep in the Top Bunk. By the time we went to bed, he'd been downstairs once for water (a highly unusual circumstance) and was holed up in his own nest of Guys on the bottom bunk. And by 3:30AM, he was visiting again - and this is how I know it wasn't just the backscratcher on my nightstand drawing him to my side of the bed. Apparently, at 3:30, I'm the Go To Parent. 

"Mom, can I sleep in your bed? I don't want to sleep alone." 

I guess he misses his brother. Although this morning, he told me he can't wait to tell the 12yo that he got to sleep in Mom and Dad's bed last night.