A sleepless night with my two-year old son

It’s just the way it goes sometimes…

Parenthood.

I didn’t know it’d be a long night at 12:54am. I thought it would be a quick settling — a bit of quiet, soothing talk and sippy cup refill, then we’d both be back to sleep until the morning.

Nearly an hour and half of fidgeting to find a comfortable spot among Bunny, Hippo, Dog, Penguin (which is a cat…) and his blanket. Nothing seemed to work, or he simply didn’t have the patience to decide if he felt comfortable in any one position. Something wasn’t right. He’d say “Done” and “Poop” every so often. He asked “Back” — he wanted his back scratched. That work a little, and eventually he grew tired enough to sleep. It was now 2:14am. I pulled myself up from the floor, snuck out of the room, and slipped back into my own bed.

Until 4am. Then we started all over again. It was past 5am that I decided we’d resort to an external environmental tactic to combatting child sleeplessness — the “Car Method.” I decreed — “Okay that’s it. We’re getting in the car.” He replied back in resigning agreement. “Car…” he said quietly. It’s a method we deployed daily during his middle infant months. Twice a day when he was on two-a-day naps, we’d buckle him into the carseat and drive along the straight, fixed highways to the north and west of Davis, sometimes as far as Woodland or Winters, though usually he’d be asleep within three or four miles.

Now that it was five o’clock and my Circadian rhythm dictated that I was to be awake for the remainder of the day, I figured a jaunt to Starbucks and a lap on the country roads would be the solution. It was still very much the heart of night, and with any luck, I might even transfer him to bed while it was still dark.

My tiredness allowed strange, powerful, negative thoughts to creep into my mind. Passing other cars on the country roads, I wondered if any where driven by drunk drivers that might lose control, and cause a head-on collision. I thought about cats, raccoons, or a deer leaping in our path, paralyzed with fear with the oncoming brightness of our headlights. I thought about terrible tragic events that would be talked about by families, friends, and the occasional stranger that read or heard our story — “Why was he even out driving around at five o’clock in the morning?” I’m sure my wife would have figured out why we were out, or least conjectured the purpose of our adventure. She knows I’m a proponent of “The Car Method” on random Saturdays when the inmate initiates a revolt against nap time.

I knew these invading thoughts had to be commonplace in parenthood, so I let them come and go, and come again, respecting them enough to know that these odd fates become realities for unsuspecting families, then hoping that we would slip by unnoticed by the gods of probability. The Car Method worked, he was fast asleep, and when we returned home, I exercised a predictable lack of judgment. Ignoring my failed experiments to transfer him from car to bed in recent weeks, I stupidly attempted to move him from the car to the house. He partly woke up when I unbuckled the seatbelt securing the carseat to the backseat, then completed the waking process during in my utter sloppiness carrying the deadweight of a two-year old plus carseat out of the backseat through the front door down the hallway and into the bedroom.

So back in the car, and again we hit the road, and again he was asleep in a few miles. When we came home and I was determined to learn from my past discretions. We’d sit in the car until he woke up — however long that might be. I kept the car running, then showed my weakness for social norms, giving in to the fear of a dog-walking neighbor thinking something strange about a parked car running idly in our carport at 5:40 in the morning. I turned off the engine, and then feeling that the sudden quiet would be too distracting to his deep slumber, I decided to turn the car on again. I realized this was a mistake before I even turned the key. The dashboard lit up, and the cold “ding! ding! ding!” of the safety belt reminder ended his sleep.

It was 6:15 by now, and off we went for a third time. If he dozed off once after awakening, I thought he might do so again. Driving north on CA-99, the morning’s light was unavoidable. We both gazed East with the unmistakable outline of the Sierra Nevada mountains, their silhouette carved from the orange sky rising from their behind their peaks. Before we reached the long, tall tree between Covell and Highway 29, I knew we’d be turning for home at the stop sign ahead. The battle was over and our day would officially begin. I hadn’t won, though I didn’t quite felt like I lost. He did sleep for another stretch and my decision to deploy The Car Method was a sound one, even if the execution smacked of impatience and amateurishness.

Back inside the house, we dressed and walked out to the family room for our daily routine of books, drawing, and toys. I broke away to prepare a breakfast of eggs and yogurt, which he ate quickly and enthusiastically.

We were both remarkably and unquestionably calm about our situation. He was tired, yet still in control of his behavioral faculties — no fits or tantrums. Maybe he sensed that it was a rough night for both of us, or maybe he sensed my subdued energy level. Off to day care we went where it was apparently just another day for him. As for me, I spent the day on the phone and in front of computer. I drank an excess of coffee as preventive maintenance and managed to grind through the day without any noticeable effects.

He was wonderful that night — we took a wagon ride to the club that afternoon, playing quietly on the basketball courts and tossed rocks into the lake. When it was time to shuttle back for dinner, he listened and climbed aboard for home. We ate dinner and read and drew and watched videos on the iPad. We took a bath and he went right to sleep that night. I stayed awake past 11:00pm, catching up on the week’s work missed from my fixed days and planning ahead for my upcoming business trip.

Parenthood.