Want to See Something?

Sullivan was having a hard time sleeping tonight; at 9 pm he was still tossing and turning and calling out for me to come get him. Usually I'd be pretty frustrated about it, but he seemed especially sad or scared tonight, so I went in and picked him up. He flung his limbs around me and squeezed tight like an octopus and I felt tears on my shoulder.

"Can I come in the office with you?" he asked - which was an absurd question because it was way past his bedtime and, ask anyone, I'm, like, the Queen of Getting Sullivan to Bed On Time...but tonight just felt like an exception, you know? 

I took him into the office, pulled him into a tight cuddle on the chair, and opened up my laptop. 

"Want to see something?" I asked him. That's his favourite question. He always wants to see something; he gets that from me. He nodded, blinking away some tears. I opened Photoshop, pulled up a picture of him, and starting playing around with it, merging it with a watercolour picture I had on my desktop. 

He settled into me, watching in fascination as I erased the colourful top layer to reveal each one of his fingers and the tips of his ears. He asked questions about the tools I was using and why I kept changing the size of the eraser and all that. I told him about opacity and he nodded like he understood. Then his eyes started drooping and he began saying things that made no sense at all, which is familiar to me because that's what Barclay does at night too. "Mom?" he asked, "Tomorrow, will I have green ears?"

"No," I said.

"Yes, I will. I will have green ears like when I was a baby."

"Okay," I said, clicking 'save' on my little art project. The action woke him up a bit and he leaned in, watching me type. 

"What're you doing now?"

"I'm saving it as a JPEG," I said.

"Maybe you should save it as a Winnipeg," he said confidently. 

"You're probably right," I said. 

And then I took him back to his room, put him to sleep, and came back in here to write it down because I can already tell it's going to be one of those memories I like to think about later on.