2 am Monday morning

A lot of people ask if Benjamin sleeps through the night. I never know what to say. Yes, he is capable of sleeping through the night: he has done it more than one occasion, and both his parents have risen like sunflowers the morning after, beaming and radiant as they sing the glories of the Regular Boy. And then there are nights like tonight, where it's 2 am and Zoogle has been thrashing around like a downer cow for three hours. Does Z. sleep through the night? Perhaps we can say: yes, as long as the night is deemed to have started at the hour of his choosing. And as long as sleep crawling, fitful dreams, random cries, and the occasional foot to the thorax are included within the general category of somnolent behavior.

A few months ago Catalina read a book called Sleep Training: The No-Cry Sleep Solution, thinking to nip this little Turandottino in the bud. "All right, what's the skinny?" I ask her, thinking to save myself the trouble of reading yet another two hundred page technical text based on an idea so flimsy that all of its essential features would fit on a stickynote. But it turned out that the wily autheress had been cheap even by the standards of advice-books: the ruling idea was so slender it slipped through the cracks entirely, and my professional reader of a wife, this trained parser of texts, was wholly incapable of giving me anything more than the roughest of vague ideas. "You need to be prepared to suffer for ten days", she managed to report. "Ten days, and then you're in the clear: consider it an investment." But the rational for the suffering, and its details, and the way all this pain was supposed to transform our child into a rat-tailed liron: all these things were forgotten, or never absorbed, or so obscured by the Attachment Parenting mumbo jumbo that they never crystalized into hard, concrete plans of action. Anyway, the punchline is that we never took the plunge, and thus continue with the nuits blanches long after most babies are sleeping like turtle doves.

And so it is that at 2 on the night before the day on which my wonderful wife freely volunteered for an extra Redeye shift to give me a little more time to work on my paper, I am up writing in my blog instead of nourishing my soon-to-be-taxed brain with a full night's sleep. Meanwhile, four guests snooze like trolls in trailers ten yards away, and two more, in the upstair's bed, have the presence of mind to mumble something about a cursed blighter as they smile drowsily and burrow deeper beneath the sheets.

Woe to the first person to show signs of repose tomorrow.