It's Me, Joshua

My son Joshua has had a habit of wanting to come into our room and get into bed with my wife and I. He's done this ever since he could walk and clamber out of his crib. He's always been quite the little acrobat and daredevil. Ask my wife about the time when he was about two and he climbed out his bedroom window because he wanted to play on the swing set outside. You might think that was adorable until you learned that his bedroom window was about seven feet off of the ground! I doubt that even the legendary Alcatraz could hold my son.
But I digress. We tried everything to get him to stay in his own bed for the entire night. Ordinarily, we would have simply sent him back to his room. He got sneaky about it, however, and would slide into our bed with all of the agility and grace of a seasoned cat burglar. We would wake up when our alarm would go off and viola, there he would be.
We tried tiring him out before bed so that he wouldn't wake up. We tried bribing him with treats and money. We tried threatening him to within an inch of his life. I think he may have known that we were working from a position of weakness, because nothing worked. I think he may have even found it to be a little funny.
The clincher for me was the night I got the bright idea to lock our bedroom door. I had been threatening to do it for weeks, but my wife would get a guilty conscience and talk me out of it. I was tired of waking up sore, so one night, I locked it while Jennifer wasn't looking.
Sure enough, about three or four that morning, I woke up to hear a tiny, tentative knock on our bedroom door. A small, plaintive voice whispers in the darkness, "Mom? Dad? It's me, Joshua." After I finished laughing myself silly, I opened the door and let him come in to snuggle with us.
I gave up after that, and tried not to make a big deal about it. He's about grown out of it, although he does relapse on occasion. His younger brother William is another story, however.