When little gosling turned one, I was determined to have him fall asleep without the breast; and for three-four months he did. He would breastfeed in an upright position and I made sure he would not linger on just suckling; only then we switched off the light, I hugged him, patted him gently on his back and said goodbye to all things in our garden, one by one, starting with the sun (“goodnight sun, who left on the other side of the planet”), moon, stars, sky, clouds, wind, trees, all the plants and all the little bugs and animals (bees, butterflies, lizards, mice), kind of what the book does. It worked, until he started going to the nursery and I went back to nursing him to sleep. 

He’s grown immediately fond of this book and he finishes my sentences by now. It is our unspoken signal for “now it’s time to sleep”. It only works at nighttime; we have different signals for the afternoon nap :P. It has become a ritual. After his bath, we let him choose 2-3 books that he wants to read, plus the “moon book”, as he calls it. He knows reading it means he has to go to sleep. Sometimes he tries to stall and runs to the book bin to bring additional books; but we start reading the moon book and he gets it. Other times, he just says “read moon book”, even if we haven’t yet read all the selected books, and we know he wants to go to sleep. 

Right on the first page, there is a telephone (“tăfon”), one of little gosling’s favourite words right now, so that one always causes a bit of excitement, together with the red balloon. He had a purple balloon (today it finally succumbed under his teeth :))), that he liked pointing to. He lingers on the picture of the cow jumping over the moon, that he recognised from one of his favourite rhymes. For a while he was fascinated by the little toy house and by its illuminated windows. 

I have a longer version, which includes describing all the objects in the room, which I do when he’s not that into sleeping yet. And he has a very short version, in which he very quickly leaves through the book, uninterested in reading it, up to the last page. There he stops and hushes us, “shhh!”, the bunny is asleep in his bed, the kittens are asleep in the rocking chair and the lamp is off. He closes the book, gets under covers, asking for “tzitzi” and saying “pa pa, daddy”.

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I don’t know how much little gosling gets from our “I love you”’s, but he gets that both bear and cub are happy. He also relates to the images and recognises in them things that we do together: He giggled with delight when he saw the bear carrying the cub on its shoulders; just how his daddy carried him on his shoulders when we went to the park and he got tired. The same with mommy doing “the horsie” for him or bathtime with daddy when he gets to splash and play around in the bathtub. I gently encouraged his imagination for some of the images – for the one in which the bears lie down and look at the skies above, I told him it’s just like when he’s breastfeeding to sleep at night.

Our favourite so far is the image of the bears touching noses. His look when we got to that page was precious: full of surprise and excitement. We had seen this before in other stories with animals and I had told him that is the way animals kiss. I asked him “do you want to do that?”. He lightened up, and with eyes wide open and a huge smile said “yeeeees”. And he came close to me with his cute, soft, little nose and we touched noses gently two-three times. He ran afterwards and did the same with daddy and so two-three more times back and forth. So heartwarming!

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