My sweaty, stealthy napper.

Henry still naps. And not just a little nap, either—two hours, sometimes three. This is unusual among the 3-year-seven-month set, I hear, but I’m not telling him that, and thankfully he rarely reads my blog, so we’re cool. I am eternally grateful for his nap, for those precious hours in which I can work, or clean grout (nothing satisfies more than clean grout, am I wrong?), or talk to my imaginary friends on my handmade cardboard phone.

He wakes up from his naps soaked in sweat. Napping is hard! (Do your kids do this? With the sweating? What do you mean you don’t have kids? What are you doing here?) When he peels himself off his damp mattress, he’s so wet I could swear he’s simply spent his nap joyfully peeing himself.

It doesn’t help that he covers himself in a quilt and won’t let me turn his fan on. His room is like an oven, but he says he likes it. “I like to be all sweaty,” he tells me. Kids are just like us, with their misguided assertions. I keep telling him he can’t like it, because I don’t. But there’s no talking to him.

Until recently he refused to get up from bed when he was done with his nap, He did the same thing in the morning: he would wake and maintain his prone position. The only muscles he moved were in the jaw region, as he would open his mouth and shriek my name, over and over. Scott and I found this unpleasant. You can get up! We told him. You can get up and come get us! We rehearsed it with him, us pretending to sleep in our bed, encouraging him from our room to come to us. And sometimes he would, and how proud we were! Isn’t that cool, we said, how you can get up! He seemed into it, and then the next morning arrived, and the same shrieky Henry alarm terrified us awake. “I couldn’t because I too busy,” he said. Too busy scaring the crap out of his parents.

Then one day it sunk in. He could stand up! The people he lives with were telling the truth, for once! He didn’t, unfortunately, come get us in the morning, when all I’ve ever wanted is for my child to pad into our bedroom and climb into bed with us and cuddle for five or six more hours. No, he decided to try out his fancy new trick after his nap, on a day when I was so deep into my work that I’d forgotten I have a child; I was hunched over my computer when from behind me a damp little hand grabbed my shirt and small voice croaked “I came to get you like you said” and I leaped from my chair and shouted “Oh GOD who told you to do that.” And then I remembered.

Update on Operation Arggh, Will Ye Get to Sleep

Your many excellent suggestions were deeply appreciated. Scott and I read each one, and realized how little we knew--like how many people drug their children into unconsciousness. Wow! That must be in style, these days! We laughed at several of your commiserating anecdotes (the highlight being M.C. whispering “Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong with my butt”). Anyway, as it turned out, the best way to get your kid to sleep is to write about his not-sleeping on the Internet.

Seriously, the day I posted this, he went to bed with nary a peep. I think he saw the determined glint in my eyes and the staple gun in my hand. (What was the staple gun for? I wasn’t saying.)

Actually, I gave him a little speech about how we were going to be cold and unfeeling and we weren’t going to give into his pint-sized demands anymore. He gave me the wet Bambi eyes and the quivering bottom lip and said, “But I’ll just be alone,” and then we discussed ways he could feel less alone, like leaving the door open or playing music (Music! And books on tape! Why didn’t I think of those!). He rejected all my ideas as “not good,” but then he went to sleep, so I didn’t care. And last night, even though he was sick with intestinal difficulties, some classical music (“classy music,” according to Henry) put him right to sleep. Although he did wake up several times in the night to announce, “I think I’m pooping.” And, poor boy, he was all too correct.

A quick rant while he’s asleep.

This must be quick, because “asleep” is becoming a rare state these days. My child, the champion sleeper, has abruptly decided that sleep is overrated. Needless to say, this is driving me NUTS.

(What’s that joke about the steering wheel on the crotch and the punch line is “driving me nuts”? Someone?)

It’s not that he’s getting up early, because although he did get up at the ass-crack of dawn this morning, usually he’s a late sleeper. It’s getting him to sleep. HE DOES NOT WANT TO GO TO SLEEP. And that makes me want him to go live somewhere else, like maybe at Grandma’s. Grandma would probably find his late-night shenanigans charming. She’d feed him cookies and the two of them could watch her DVD box set of the Dean Martin show until he passed out from boredom and embarrassment for poor old Deano.

(Every time I visit my parents my mom says, “I thought we’d watch Dean Martin tonight!” And I have to remind her for the 3,000th time that I don’t really deeply enjoy watching drunk people warble popular classics of the ‘50s and then trip over some props. Maybe a few minutes of it, okay, but we’re inevitably trapped watching one episode after another at my parents’ house with the volume cranked up to a window-rattling decibel, and at some point my mother will turn to me and ask, “What are you crying about?” and I’ll say “I didn’t know I was” and then I’ll go upstairs and try to drown myself in their bathtub only I added too many Epsom Salts and I keep bobbing to the surface.)

As I was saying, he does not want to sleep. At all. We put him down at 9 p.m., and for the next three hours, every five minutes is another request from his room. First he needs A Drink. Then he needs a Toy. Then he needs Something, but He Doesn’t Know What. Then he needs a Hug and a Song. Then a Better Song. Then he wants me to Stay and Chat. And on, and so forth.

I have tried various tactics, none of which have worked. They include but are not limited to: Calming Explaining That Sleep is Important. Ignoring. Yelling. Tears. Insisting that He Fall Asleep NOW Damn It. More Tears. Attempting to Ignore, but Failing. Yelling at Husband.

You see? Failproof! Nothing could be wrong with my strategies! I am going to write one of them child rearing books that show how to rear a child good because I know.

Last night, at 11:30, after an hour of vigorous denial over the goings-on near Henry’s room, I realized that all was quiet and went to check things out. I found Scott sleeping on the floor of Henry’s room while Henry, fully upright and alert, chatted with his father’s inert form. “Darth Vader goes whoosh and the Storm Trooper turns him into Darth Vader and when I’m at the playground I go whoosh down the slide but sometimes I fall and I get a little scrape but I’m okay,” he said as his father snored lightly against the carpeting.

This had better end soon because it's cutting into my precious blog-writing and -reading time.

Hey, dawn? I got a rosy finger for you RIGHT HERE.

Day 1

Today, it happened. We knew this day would come. We’ve been spoiled for so long, and why should the Gods spare us, when so many other parents have been suffering since the day their children were born?

Today, the boy woke up at dawn.

Okay, if not dawn, then sometime around then. Close enough. Dawn-ish. Listen, asshole, it felt like dawn, and this is my blog, so I’m calling it dawn. Sorry, was I being irritable? Sorry. I woke up at DAWN.

Which, look, on its own, not the worst thing. We can enjoy this fine summer day, in all its splendor! We can leave the house before the cancer-giving rays of 10 am arrive! We will be like the early bird! Surely that early bird doesn’t start the day cursing up a storm! But the thing is. Here’s the thing. We, the husband and I, are not the morning-loving types. We do not greet the day with a song and a smile. We stay up late watching “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” then we read for a while, then we eventually manage to find our way to sleep, and by then it's usually insanely late. We roll out of bed when the child wakes, which until now has been (and I write this, knowing full well that half of the Finslippy-reading population will have no sympathy whatsoever for us from this moment on) somewhere around 9.

9, or even later. Sometimes, yes, sometimes as late as 10. This is why I love him. I thought we had an understanding. He sleeps late, and I will continue to provide affection.

I tried to reason with him. When I heard his little voice singing out to us from his crib, and I saw that the big hand on the clock was at some obscenely low number, I went to him. I shook his hand, and I said, “Good sir, it is still yet an early hour. Would you not enjoy a few more hours of rest? Your parents would be most obliged, and we would start the day in good humors, and also, you’re killing us with this waking up early shit. Please, I beg you. I need more sleep. Please. I’ll buy you a car. Anything. Anything. Please.” He probably couldn’t understand most of it through all of my sobbing, but anyway, by the time I got around to “please,” he had already clambered over the crib railing, monkeyed up my arms, and settled on top of my head, demanding Cheerios and Elmo, tout de suite.

But maybe this is an aberration. Maybe—probably!—some unparalleled set of events occurred in his room, like a chipmunk got caught in the air conditioner, which shorted out, causing some some sparks to fly into the room and hit that damned stuffed animal that when you hit it, it sings DEEDLE DEEDLE DOO over and over until you feel like madness is seconds away, DEEDLE DEEDLE DOO DOOP; maybe all that happened! Which I didn’t see any evidence of, and I really looked, but you never know! Yes. Yes, I’m sure this won’t happen again. Oh please.

Day 2

Damn.

Damn, damn, damn damn.

Is it so much to ask? Is it so cruel of me to request that he sleeps until a decent hour? Or to ignore him until he goes back to sleep? Not that he would. Not that he did. I laid there for minutes that seemed like hours, listening to him singing “Momm-eee,” over and over, in this singsong that I used to think was so cute and you know what I think of it now? I think he’s taunting me. It’s like, “Mommy, you chump, get up! Mommy, you love me too much to ignore me! The beast has risen from its slumber, and so must you, Mommy! MOMMY!” A couple of times he stopped, and I thought, oh, thank you, Lord, I knew I could count on you. Then the dog would bark—WHY DO WE HAVE A DOG? Who let him in here?—or the people upstairs would walk around—who told those people they could walk? Why didn’t we hobble them years ago?—and it would start up again, the taunting, the “Momm-eee, Momm-eee.”

I walked around Brooklyn yesterday like a zombie. A zombie with hair sticking up all at weird angles, like antennae. I forgot to fix the hair before leaving the house. This is not something I forget, normally. You don’t know this about me, but I am all about the presentation. It’s not like I’m applying eyeshadow every morning, but mascara, that’s another story. But yesterday it was all I could do to apply sunscreen to both of us. I greased us up with SPF 3,000, threw him into the stroller, and lurched toward the playground, forgetting his drink, his snack, and my sanity. I stayed in the shadows and hissed at anyone who came near us. At some point Henry asked for some Goldfish, and I may, I just may, have said, “Fuck Goldfish.”

No, I’m sure I didn’t! Ha, ha! Wouldn’t that have been terrible, had I said it! Which I did not!

Day 3

[EXPLETIVES DELETED BY TYPEPAD MANAGEMENT. We’re not running a cussing factory, here. Although those were extraordinary. What’s wrong with you, woman? You’d think no one else ever had to get up early.]

Day 4

Me so tired. Me not enjoying this. Me not like baby. Me want compose poem, but me not remember how.

Me sad. So sad, me.