Night Moves

Now that I have a baby again, people ask me all the time if I'm getting any sleep - the assumption being that Mira might be disrupting our nights. Our nights are disrupted, but not by Madame Baby. It's the rest of the kids!

Ethan is a worrier, although in general he does sleep OK. He tends to lose sleep over enormous issues such as the Large Hadron Collider creating a black hole that sucks the Earth in, global warming and 2012. (I'm not sure where he saw the trailer, but heavens sakes, what 13-year-old wouldn't be afraid after seeing that?)

Abby is a classic insomniac, complete with clock watching and unproductive insomnia calculations: "If I fall asleep in (x number of) minutes I'll still get (y hours of) sleep..." She denies clock watching - but who insists on wearing a watch to bed every night?

Gracie has fears. In addition to the usual ghost/robbers/fire, she has appeared in our bedroom in the middle of the night upset over a loose tooth (what if she swallows it?), quicksand (the sand at the beach "felt funny") and bugs. "Is it true that a person swallows eight spiders a night?" (No, it's not. Nor is it true that the average person swallows eight spiders a year while sleeping. Urban legend, my gullible friends). Also, "What if a spider crawls on me at night?" As tempted as I was to reference Peter Brady on the Brady Bunch's Hawaii trip, I simply said, "There aren't any spiders in your bedroom."

In case you're wondering who planted these creepy-crawly ideas in Gracie's head, look no further...
Gracie's ultimate sleep depriver, however, is Bloody Mary. I remember this one from my own childhood. I could wring the little neck of the classmate who shared this delightful piece of folklore with her.

It's no mystery where my kids come by their nocturnal unrest: I am an insomniac with a childhood chock full of sleepless nights. I was terrified of experiencing my own head-spinning scene after watching The Exorcist. I lost countless hours of sleep worrying that "666" was tattooed on my scalp, unbeknown to me, like the boy in The Omen, Damien. (Or, as my sister Deb believed he was named, "Damien Omen.") And I was absolutely terrified of Jodie, the demonic, red-glowing-eyed pig from The Amityville Horror. (I can tell you that when you're a sleepy, near-sighted 14-year-old, a digital clock across the bedroom displaying a red, blurry 2:02 looks a lot like glowing eyes). Do you sense a theme here? Do you think at some point, my young brain would have concluded that books and movies about the supernatural were a BAD IDEA?

I have to admit that Randy handles the brunt of our nighttime dramas. Sometimes I fall asleep next to Randy and wake up next to Gracie, with no memory of anything except my carefree (child-free) dreaming. They'll all grow out of this, right? If my calculations are correct, Gracie should start sleeping better around the time that a classmate explains Bloody Mary to Mira.