Main Page Blog Getting Pregnant Articles Pregnancy Articles Parenting Articles TLOL Article Directory Chinese Gender Chart Pregnancy and Parenting Journals	Sleep: The Final Frontier by Jonathan Kronstadt Sleep, I've decided, is a four-letter word. Of course, it's 2:06 on a delightfully frigid morning, so it's possible my math skills aren't at their peak right now. But when you haven't had enough, sleep becomes literally the only word that matters. This night I was good, went to sleep about 10, and was REM-ing away when my nine-month-old in the room next to ours hiccuped. Or maybe he burped. Or sighed. In any case, whatever cute little gastric noise he produced whacked me into a state of undeniable wakedness. You know, that condition where you lie there and try to convince yourself that yes, you can go back to sleep no problem if it weren't for the noise of your own brain laughing hysterically at you for even pretending to believe such drivel. When we bought this house five years ago we based our decision on the location, the parks nearby, convenience to public transportation, positive flow, and the fact that if we had to spend one more Sunday tromping through strangers' family rooms we'd start machine-gunning anyone in a gold jacket. What we failed to consider was that the home's three bedrooms, while spacious and light-filled, are as close as Siamese triplets. Child number one was, as babies go, a pretty good sleeper. My most painful memories of her sleep quirks involved the oh-so-delicate process of transferring her body from the warmth of parental embrace to the cold, impersonal cotton of the crib sheet. The trick was to maintain as much body contact as possible while hefting her over the side of the crib and down onto the mattress without actually falling on top of her, which I can tell you from experience is a bad, bad mistake. Then, if you could get her down without waking her up, the next trick was getting out of the room without undoing one's fine work. Again, when we bought the house oh how we crowed about the lovely hardwood floors. But hardwood floors creak, and creaking is to a baby's sleep what beef gravy is to doughnuts. But there was only one of her, so during the bad periods we would sort of switch off, like some crazed wrestling tag team, trying to maintain at least one set of functioning temporal lobes in case anything important came up, like ordering Chinese food. We survived, and now, at 3 1/2, she's a pretty dependable sleeper, as long as she never naps. It's odd and cruel how something as lovely and desirable as a nap can turn, almost without warning, into something about as welcome as head lice. These days, if she naps for even 15 minutes, she stays up later than we do, and that, for all you new parents, is not a good thing. Child number two (not his real name) was, for the first two weeks, a sleeping machine. Twenty hours a day this kid slept. We were reverent. Every few hours he would open his eyes, look around for a few minutes, decide being conscious was way too intense, and go back to sleep. Eventually he settled in to sleeping through the night--an admittedly relative term--at about three months. Four blissful months later, he decided sleeping through the night was not such a good idea. In fact, it was a really bad idea, such a bad idea that we had to be warned about it, loudly and repeatedly, as if somehow we weren't paying attention. He was such a sweet little worm that we figured his nighttime wakings must be the product of some visceral need, like hunger. So we picked him up and fed him. My wife became convinced it was an ear infection, mostly because my daughter had several dozen ear infections before she could walk, and here Max was five months old and was still adamantly pro-biotic. So I took him to the pediatrician, who must love visits like this. No, doctor, no symptoms, he just refuses to conform to our lifestyle. Fix him please, and here's your five buck co-payment. Fortunately, I got the doctor with the fuzzy koala bear riding his stethoscope, and he patiently explained to me that it was probably separation anxiety. I explained to him that we slept separated by a wall about as thin as the plot for a Schwarzenegger film. He explained to me that I was an idiot. It appeared that by picking him up and feeding him in the middle of the night, we were actually providing him incentive to wake up. To paraphrase our doctor, if you know you're going to Lutece for dinner, you don't belly up to Shoney's $3.99 lunch buffet. Thus began operation cruel parent, which consisted of not picking him up and feeding him when he awoke before sunrise, which made him, in a word, real mad. We hung tough, refusing to pick him up but performing any other circus act that would appease him, which one night included 16 choruses of "Getting to Know You." I often wondered, addle-minded of course, if he really loved the song or if anything from "The King and I" would do. And what about "Carousel?" It was an ugly three weeks. We were three years older and crankier than when we did this with our first born, and they were three parenting years, which are like dog years, only longer. They're like really big dog years. "Your turn" became the two nastiest words in the language, even nastier than "potty training." We snapped at each other with a frequency that can best be described by using the counting system of the Yanomamo Indians of the Amazon Basin, who only have three numbers--one, two, and more than two. We snapped at each other more than two times. On the up side, sleep deprivation allowed me to Vincent Van Gogh some telemarketing geek who delivered a "courtesy call" at 9 Sunday morning. Things are better now. We've come to the realization that if we spend 12 hours in bed, we can usually get 6 hours of sleep. Those are hall of fame numbers for a baseball player. Of course, if I was a baseball player I could pay someone to sing show tunes to my kids in the middle of the night, and I'd get to stay in nice hotels where there are hardly any kids, and....where was I? Right, sleep. Actually, I think I've got it figured out. We've got the right kids. We've just got the wrong house. This work is copyrighted by the author, Jonathan Kronstadt. Reproduction of any kind is prohibited with out the express consent of the author. Please feel free to let Jonathan know what you think of his work by sending him an email.