One Hour to Get Her Down. One Creak to Undo It.
That night, I was a ninja.
Bedtime for our three-year-old. Elapsed time: one hour, twelve minutes. The rhythm of the pats, the exact moment to let my hand go still, the patience to wait until her breathing went deep. All of it, flawless.
All that was left was to leave the room.
This is where the real event begins.
Heel first, shifting my weight over slowly. Never loading the floorboards. Holding my breath. Three steps to the door.
I've got this.
I have absolutely got this.
Creak.
Floor, I Thought You Of All Things Were On My Side
Volume-wise, maybe an earwax spoon's worth. But in a bedroom after midnight, it's a thunderclap.
I turned around. My daughter was sitting up on her futon. Our eyes met.
"...wanna play?"
We do not wanna play. Back to square one.
Round two took 48 minutes. Two hours total. The date had changed.
Post-Match Analysis (Delivered With a Straight Face)
- Flooring creaks at night. The board that was silent during the daytime rehearsal only asserts itself after dark. Apparently it's a temperature and humidity thing.
- Weight shifting doesn't cancel it out. A man in his thirties weighs what a man in his thirties weighs, no matter how you distribute it.
- The first 15 minutes of sleep are shallow. "She's asleep" mostly means she isn't, yet.
As a countermeasure, I later went around in the daytime stepping on every board in the room and marked the noisy ones on a floor plan.
Wife: "What is that blueprint?"
Testing established that the safe route is a long way around, hugging the wall for half the perimeter. Every night, a father exits along the wall. If there were a security camera, someone would report the movement.
The Takeaway
Bedtime isn't over until you're out of the room.
Also: when the season changed, so did the location of the creaking boards. The blueprint is now, safely, just a piece of paper.
