My stomach is always cold. My wife’s hand is always warm. My wife is always quick to fall asleep. I am more of a slow-sleeper. Like so many other differences between me and my wife, these ones also turn out to be a perfect combination, in this case for me – when I have my sleeping wife’s warm hand on my cold stomach, I too fall beautifully and quickly asleep and my stomach gets cozy and warm.
Before our son was born this was our normal way of falling asleep. Nowadays our sleeping patterns and locations has changed many times so the nights when I fall beautifully asleep with a warm hand on my stomach seems fewer than the stars I can see in the sky when sleepless looking out the window, seeing a lit up highway traveling above the busy streets of Tokyo. Although I can miss the old way of safely falling asleep, strangely enough (or maybe not) I do not feel at all jealous of our son who gets to fall asleep enjoying his mum’s warm hand. Instead I feel how much he is my son.
Sometimes our baby wakes up and there is only his dad, with no breast milk to offer, who is on standby. Lately, I have found that putting my hand on his stomach often makes him forget that he was waking up, forget that he wanted to have milk, and instead he soon falls back into sleep again. I lie there next to him, feeling how joyful it is to be able to share the hand on stomach experience with my son – milk aside, there really is no better way of falling asleep.
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