A warm dog

It’s strange when you wake up around 5 in the morning and it feels like you’ve been asleep — uninterrupted — for a few hours, and in a matter of seconds a million different things run through your mind, some confused (did I really not wake up once since 11pm?), some investigative (did my wife just handle him and I didn’t hear?), and some panicked (SIDS?), but then you’re relieved when your wife whispers with a smile take a look at this, because you know nothing’s wrong, so you’re no longer confused or panicked but just curious about the mystery — what happened? what was the secret sauce that caused him to sleep all night? — and you rub your eyes and take a look, and you realize that maybe you’d been missing this simple solution all along, that you didn’t need to read dozens of websites and books on sleep training, that you didn’t need to discuss strategies with other parents, that investing in a sleep consultant was a silly luxury, that you didn’t need to buy all different varieties of sleep sacks, that it had nothing to do with your particular rocking technique, that lullabies might not particularly matter, that you didn’t need to keep a sleep log and try to time nap cycles, that whether to sleep him on his back or on his stomach was much of a muchness, that it had nothing to do with whether you were feeding him too much or too little, that all of that didn’t really matter at all, and that all this time all you were missing, all that was really needed… was a warm dog.