15 minutes

For the past six months, I've been busier than ever. I started and finished student teaching second grade, finished my masters and started teaching 5th grade.

Teaching second grade was a dream. I loved my students, they loved me. They gave me beautifully decorated construction paper cards and they brought me flowers.

On the other hand, my fifth graders despise my existence and liken my role as their teacher as a dictator who hands out homework, keeps them busy with classwork and  oh, makes them mind their manners and abide by the rules.

Plain and simple, they hate me. That I'm sure of because they tell me so when they aren't calling me "Ms. Garbage".

But, while it might seem like I should have thrown myself a pity party over the Christmas break, I didn't. Even though I really desperately wanted to.

Instead, I reverted back to my stay at home mom days, boy do I miss those, and tried to soak in as much time as I could with this guy.

Today, for the first time in such as long time, Ham fell asleep in my arms during nap time. It was a miracle because neither one of us can find a comfortable position in the rocking chair anymore. We've finally outgrown it, which makes me really sad.


But that's the territory we're embarking on now, the toddler years.

These days, I don't have the lengthy rocking chair sessions I use to when Ham was a baby. Now bedtime is much different.

It always starts by reading Ham his usual favorites, Otis, Otis and the Tornado, Are You My Mother? and Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

He sips on his milk and makes the faces he's sees in the stories. If Goldilocks yawns, then he stretches his arms out and yawns with her, which in turn makes me really yawn.

And when we are done, Ham says "The N (End)", I turn the lights out and sit him in my lap and we spend the next 15 minutes in the dark talking.

If you jip Ham out of these 15 minutes of quality time, he is sure to cry. If you abide by it, he gets into bed fifteen minutes later with no fuss and asks for his plastic cars to sleep with.

I don't mind it though because these are the best 15 minutes of my life.

On days when the 5th graders have torn my ego to shreds. On days where I've yelled and screamed and called parents that don't care. On days where the grades do not reflect the time I spent teaching, I have these 15 minutes to look forward to.

A time when all is quiet and all is still in the house, except for the sound of the rocking chair creaking and Ham leaning in and whispering "What's Zat (That)?" to every creak he hears.

Sometimes he sit in my lap, facing me and he pretends to get dizzy from all the rocking. He says "Wa-Oh" and puts his arms out to balance himself. Sometimes he shakes his straight blond hair just to see it schwoosh from side to side. And other days, he examines my face for "boo boo's", which there aren't any, but he kisses them anyway and rubs my face softly with his hands. He reminds me that I have eyes and that he has eyes and we sing songs we made up about the moon. Then we check outside his window to see if the moon is out there, but we never see it.

Then it is time to lay him down. I lower him into the crib and he reminds me that his cars are not there, I tell him I'll be right back and I rummage through the house searching high and low for them. When I get back I hand him the cars I found, he tells me, "Dank Q" and he leans in to give me a goodnight kiss.

And as I creep out of his room and bring the door to a crack, I am thankful for our one-on-one time no matter how short it might seem in these toddler times.