Ships Passing in the Night

By Al Horn

Our grandchildren have been living with us for over eight months now. We have become comfortable with some of their idiosyncrasies. Well, for the most part, I should say. Nighttime is still a little troublesome.

We have a regular routine of taking them to their rooms at eight-thirty every night. My wife takes the girl into her room and reads her a story. I take the boy into his room for the same. After that, the routines diverge.

The girl will fall to sleep on her own and will sleep through the night. It is rare that she wakes us from a bad dream or a tummy ache. She usually sleeps well past dawn and almost always wakes up in a quiet mood. Thirty minutes wrapped up in a small blanket in front of the television and she is wide-awake and ready to attack the day. Her brother is a different story.

I lay him down after reading and have to wait until he falls asleep. If I don't, he fusses and cries. He is not afraid of the dark; he just doesn't want to be left alone. Normally he will fall asleep after fifteen to twenty minutes. At that point I can get up, make sure he is well covered and slip out of the room. Unfortunately he rarely (never) sleeps through the night. After three or four hours he will wake up and notice he is alone. He will call out or come to our room and want one of us to get him a drink and wait with him till he goes back to sleep. This may take two minutes or two hours. That plays havoc with whoever gets up with him. As a consequence, we take turns dealing with our little nocturnal visitor.

I get up Monday through Thursday at four-thirty to go to work. On those nights my wife will get up with him and take him to our guestroom. She does this because on the nights it takes him two hours to go back to sleep, he likes to toss and turn and nobody in the same bed is going to get any sleep until he does. It is not unusual for him to wake up three or four times before the morning light.

After my alarm wakes me, I will get cleaned up, dressed and prepare our bed for different occupants. I usually go into the guestroom and wake the wife so that she can move to the other bed while I change the boy then carry him off to our bed where he spends the rest of the night.

For the three days I am off, I get up with him and will lie on the floor next to him till he falls back to sleep. For me he usually falls asleep quicker and sleeps longer. I think it's because he knows ol' pa-pa doesn't put up with any playing around. I then get up and go lay down until he wakes again. At morning light I get up when he awakes then he and I will go downstairs to watch children's shows. I missed the 'Barney' era. Now it's the Wiggles and the rest of the Disney crowd. It's a system that has been evolving for the last couple of months.

Occasionally, I will leave his room and find my wife on her way to the kitchen for a drink. We sleepily ask each other if everything is all right. By the time she comes back to bed I'm usually sound asleep. Sometimes the next day we will stop and ask one another if we met during the night, not sure if it was real or just a dream. Afterwards we pause and daydream about waking up together the next morning. Hey, it could happen.