I thought I heard Charlie calling me from his bedroom. It was about 6:30 AM, earlier than he usually wakes up, but not impossibly early for him.
Charlie is four year-old, but he still sleeps in his crib. We keep our kids in their crib as long as possible because it makes our lives easier, but we’ll have to transition him to a bed soon. Until then, he calls me every morning and I pluck him from the crib.
Then he snuggles with Elysha or Clara.
It’s one of my favorite moments of every day.
I open his door, and I find Charlie sitting in his crib with his legs crossed. He’s looking down at his lap.
“Did you call me?” I ask him.
“No,” he says. “My light isn’t green yet.”
Charlie has a traffic light alarm clock. We set it on red at night as we put him to bed, and when it switches to green at 6:45 AM, he’s allowed to call for me. He doesn’t always adhere to it, but he almost always does.
“Oh,” I say. “I thought I heard you. You ready to get up?”
“No,” he says.
“No? What are you doing?”
“I’m thinking about my dreams and my life,” Charlie says. “Until the green light comes on.”
I couldn’t believe it. My boy is meditating in his crib.
Later on, after he was out of his crib, I asked him if he thinks about his dreams and his life everyday. He said no. He told me he only thinks like that if he wakes up before the light changes green.
“Do you like to think about your dreams and your life?” I asked
“Yeah!” he said. “It’s important!”
It took me 42 years to begin meditating. Charlie figured it out while still sleeping in a crib.
