#duggles

For Father’s Day, I want to share one of my favorite memories of my dad:

My dad is a prolific snuggler. He LOVES snuggling. And because I was a tiny energetic ADHD child I was extremely difficult to snuggle. It was also a challenge to get me to go to sleep at all, and because I was like 4 I needed to nap at least once every day to not turn into a manic distructo-goblin tornado.

My mom had learned how to outsmart me - she knew if she could trick me into sitting still for like 5 minutes I’d just fall asleep, like a shark asphyxiating without movement. It worked sometimes but sometimes it was still a struggle. My dad’s technique was then used if mom’s strategic outmaneuvering of a 4-year-old failed to keep me sitting still for the requisite 300 seconds needed for my tiny body (acting as-if propelled by a motor) to shut down.

My dad’s technique was great because I was a TOTAL daddy’s girl so I would basically agree to do anything he asked. And his strategy was to come up to me around nap time and tell me that he was SO tired and that he just couldn’t sleep without snuggles and that all he needed was a few minutes of snuggles and he’d be able to fall asleep and I could go back to playing and kicking stuff and scrabbling all over the walls like a bug on amphetamines.

Of course, my dad, who liked sleeping about as much as he likes being dunked in acid, was actually tricking me. He would lie down next to me, put an arm around me, slow his breathing down, and eventually I would just kinda doze off and he would sneakily get up and go do something around the house.

Because I was such a sucker for my dad’s pleas for help I was fully incapable of using logic or recognizing patterns and always agreed to help him sleep and never realized this trick. I, in fact, only learned about this a few years ago when I was working with my mom on a Christmas puzzle and started getting sleepy and she laughed and said this is how she got me to nap when I was a kid. I was hit with a tidal wave of memories of falling asleep mid-puzzle and waking up in bed while she and my dad talked about their different strategies and I realized that my dad’s technique for getting me to nap STILL worked and my parents STILL sometimes did that when I was visiting on the weekends and seemed tired. I was like 25. To be honest even now that I know how it works it still works, and now that my beautiful wife @cintailed knows about this trick she has also successfully gotten me to nap on days where I’m exhausted from work but trying to “push through” for some reason.