I have failed to live up to my father's example, and let's face it: was the bar really that high?

An overdue story:

A couple weeks ago we drove up to Rochester for the Conners family's pregnancy-related revelation party. So now we know they're having a girl (and congratulations to them). But to make the trip reasonable to inflict on our two young boys, we had to arrange to stay overnight. Two four-hour trips in one day would have been way too much for any of us to handle.

So with the Conners' permission, we drove up Saturday, stayed the night, and drove back Sunday. Great party, and really great to see friends again. I don't know how often I'll get back to Minnesota now that we've moved, so I tried to make the most of it.

I could tell dozens of little stories from that trip. One of my personal favorite moments was revealing to Casey that it was time for bed. Steve wanted to administer bedtime, but as soon as he picked up Casey, the poor boy burst into tears. So I carried him upstairs instead, where Erika and I spent a few minutes trying to calm him down. He was SO distraught, and no reassurances were getting through until one of us mentioned that everyone was going to sleep, not just him, and we'd all have breakfast in the morning, and wouldn't that be fun? Suddenly he calmed down, and it dawned on me ... the last time Casey spent the night, we left him for days while we hunted for a place to live in Madison. He wasn't upset about bedtime, he was upset because he thought we were leaving him. Once we told him that mommy and daddy were staying too, he had no more problems. I was kicking myself for not thinking of that sooner.

But I had not yet begun to kick myself, because the next day, after a typically amazing breakfast and a thorough inspection of the house to make sure we hadn't forgotten anything, we hit the road, bound for Madison again. Twenty-five minutes into the trip, the phone rang. As soon as I saw it was Steve calling, I knew ... we forgot something. Grr. But then Steve revealed what it was: Casey's blue "100" blanket, so named because it has the number 100 stitched in a corner. And that's when the horror hit me.

Casey LOVES this blanket. It's more a constant of bedtime for him than Moonbeam Bear, and we've had many, many nights when the absence of the 100 blanket is an emergency preventing all sleep. Hell, you have to ORIENT the blanket properly so the corner with the 100 on it is located in arm's reach. Spin the blanket around so the 100 patch is at his feet, and you're just going to have to go back in there five minutes later because Casey can't find the 100 in the dark. Sleep is the household's biggest problem, and most of our family conversation centers on who's slept when, how much sleep they got, and how it is never, never enough. And the blanket that Casey absolutely needs for a peaceful bedtime is back in Rochester. Damn it.

Now before I go further, let me tell you another story from my own childhood. My dad used to play a lot of softball, and sometimes that took us to weekend tournaments at parks a long drive from our house. And my sister and I would go along, play on the playground until it was time to go home, and then we'd drive back. But on one trip, Susan burst into tears after driving home for an hour, because she'd "lost Bernie," a stuffed dog she'd left on the playground somewhere. And it is now family legend how my heroic father turned the car around, drove us alllllll the way back, plucked the dog off the swing where it had apparently been rocking untouched in the breeze for several hours, and then drove us home again. He added two hours or so to an already long drive just to retrieve this lost stuffed animal that my sister had to have.

And so when we'd forgotten Casey's blanket, it was a little different, because he wasn't yet upset, but we knew he WOULD be. But I didn't think twice about it. I set the car's GPS to take us back to Rochester so I could get the blanket.

"Really?" Erika asked. I sighed. I didn't tell her about the story with the dog and the park and my father. I just told her I thought we ought to go back, but -- with the GPS reporting a 30-minute drive back to Steve's -- it would add an hour to our already long trip. It's tough transporting a 2-year-old and a 7-month-old in the car that long, and nobody was thrilled at the idea of adding an hour, so with Erika expressing some reservations ... I called Steve back and told him we weren't coming, and he should drop the blanket in the mail.

And then I spent the next four hours fighting off the guilt while I drove. Somewhere inside me, a voice kept whispering, "A GOOD father would have gone back."

We got home, and it got to be bedtime, and Erika sat Casey down on the bed and said she had something important to tell him. You could tell Casey sensed this was a serious matter, because he quieted right down and held still and studied his mom carefully to figure out what was going on. And so Erika explained that we'd left the 100 blanket behind at Steve's, and we'd have to have it sent in the mail, and we'd get it in a few days. Casey, in the sweetest voice he's got: "OK, Mommy." But we weren't sure he really got it. And sure enough, Erika started to get up, told Casey it was time for bed, good night, etc. "100 blanket!" Casey yelled. Erika explained again, we don't have the 100 blanket, it's at Steve's house. And that's when Casey started to cry.

Oh, the guilt.

A few days later the blanket arrived in the mail, and Casey was so delighted he wouldn't let it go, just clasped it around his neck and ran around wearing it like a cape for an hour. So it's got a happy ending, I guess, but still. I missed the chance to live up to my father's example, and now I'll have to live with it.

The sounds of naptime

Naptime has been going on for about 90 minutes now, and from the bedroom I can hear long, mournful harmonica notes. I wonder what he's trying to tell me.