For four-year-old boys, sleeping is definitely overrated

Nobody sleeps here.

It’s ten pm, dinner is long over, the mess is cleaned up, and all the dishes are done. My husband and I are watching the late news, do our usual complaining about the weather forecast (is it ever not too hot or too cold in Nebraska?) and discuss the day’s events. Although I am not knitting, and my husband does not smoke a pipe, we present a picture of domestic bliss.

With one exception: he’s still here. Have you ever heard the expression about Fish and Visitors only staying pleasant for three days? It’s also true for children who refuse to go to bed. Now, my daughter usually goes to bed at a decent hour. She might go and visit the bathroom 3-4 times after she’s supposed to have gone to sleep, and sometimes she’ll come out, claim that she’s “absolutely starving” and request a three-course meal. When this happens, we are, of course, sympathetic but firm. We calmly and sweetly explain that this is not possible (“No! Go to bed!!!”), after which she stomps back to her room and eventually falls asleep. Voila: mission accomplished.

With our son, things are not that simple. To him, sleep is a hateful thing, much worse than potty training or, say, a Bris. After he takes a bath, a healthy screaming fit ensues. He doesn’t want to come out of the tub. We are bigger and stronger, plus there’s two of us, so it only takes us 10 minutes to chase and capture the wet and screeching little goblin and bring him into his bedroom. After all this running he’s been air-dried, which is pretty handy. We then dress him and make “story-time”. This has nothing to do with actually reading a book. It means lying on his bed (without touching his red pillow, the red pillow is off-limits), and giving in to his demands to be tickled senseless. We get tired of that pretty quickly and wish him goodnight. You guessed it, he yells at us a bit, then follows us downstairs. He takes out all the toys I’ve meticulously cleaned up, jumps on the couch some, and tries to strangle one of us. He wants to eat weird combinations of food which he takes out of the fridge himself (Lox with applesauce, anyone? It’s better rubbed in the carpet!), after which he eventually falls asleep on the couch. If we try to move him too soon, he’ll wake up again, and we can start over.

The other day, my husband said: “I wonder what he would do if we just left him there.” I told him that he’d eventually fall off the couch and hit his head against the coffee table. “So what you’re saying is we should move the coffee table and put down some pillows?” Well, that’s one option we might be tempted to try some day. It wouldn’t be convenient, though: he would have to climb the stairs in semi-darkness, whereas if we put him in his bed, he can just walk the three steps down the hall in order to climb into bed with us. Because that, you guessed it, is where he wants to sleep.