The Baby Walks At Midnight

For the past several months, we have been struggling to persuade our 18-month-old son to go to sleep at a decent hour. Our doctor told us this would be a difficult task, given the fact that we are living out of the common area of our apartment, and I am a night owl by nature. This week, our child has resorted to vampirism.

An average day starts for the sproglet and I when we awaken, sometimes shortly before noon but usually after, face our day with groggy grumbling shared between us, and go about our daily business. This for me consists of working on the web projects that are intended to bolster the family's income, while fending off the child, whose daily entertainment is, quite simply, "finding new ways to give daddy gray hairs".

This is followed by an afternoon nap, which I regulate heavily and he resists regulation of; if he does not sleep enough, he is cranky for the entire night. If he sleeps too much, he spends the rest of the night zooming around the house like a Japanese economy car on a shot of nitrous oxide, driven by an over-caffeinated and socially repressed businessman. Now, mind you, his elective is always the latter, and he is very good at persuading me to allow this to happen. When he naps, it is more like he enters into a catatonic state from which no sound, act of violence, or bodily jostling can awake him. Even the lure of an unattended computer keyboard is not enough to rouse him from his "standby" period.

As a result, we usually spend the rest of the evening experiencing The Child Who Wouldn't Quit Running. This is also accompanied by a light dose of The Child Who Pulls Things Until They Fall Down. On a good night, he falls asleep at midnight. On a bad night...

This has been a week of bad nights. The baby sleeps until a whopping 11 p.m., and awakens to discover that the whole night is ahead of him, and darnit, he wants to paint the town red. Or crayon the living room red; they've gotta start somewhere. So he stays up, even with all the lights out and one of us in a dead sleep, zooming around in the pitch dark, using his baby-vision to see obstacles that may in fact be fatal to incautious mommies and daddies.

The final result is this: he does not go to sleep until the sun is on the verge of poking its head above the horizon. Only then does he crawl onto the bed he shares with mommy, curls up, and goes to sleep like the delightful little angel (haha, sometimes my jokes make me laugh too) that he is.