Sleep and the Sinful Daddy

I have mixed emotions about last night. Cosi slept through the night. But I think the cold medicine had a lot to do with it :-/

Each week, Cosi sleeps through the night about twice. Another 2 or so nights, she wakes up once or twice, but only long enough for me to put her back to bed. Then there are usually several nights a week where she wakes up every 20-30 minutes over the course of 3 hours. Often she is screaming, like she's having nightmares. Since nature hasn't equipped me to handle Trey's needs when he wakes up at night, I leave him to April, which means Cosi is my night-time responsibility.

I always pictured myself as the kind and sympathetic father, who at all hours would go and comfort my daughter, rocking her back to sleep. Sometimes, I am alike that. But sometimes, it is 3 a.m., I haven't slept yet that night, I know that her brother will be awake in 2 hours, and I'm grumpy. (I also have a theory that Cosi and Trey telepathically communicate to make sure that one of them is awake at all times...) That's when my sleepy, muddled mind justifies standing at her door and sternly telling my crying child to "Go back to sleep." Yeah, Rob, good one. Do you think she is standing there sniffling through tears thinking, "What am I supposed to do now? I'm sleepy, it's dark, there's my bed. What should I do? Won't some stern, unsympathetic voice please give me a command?"

[side note: For those who haven't had a toddler, you may be inclined to think, as I once did, that any child who is awake for much of the night is bound to make up for it by sleeping some during the day. You would be suffering from false hope if thought that. For Cosi, there is absolutely no correlation between sleepless nights and nap days.]

But then there are moments that remind me why I need to ignore that base desire to intimidate my child to sleep. The other night, sometime around 2 a.m., she was up for the dozenth time that night, and I was holding her in my lap, slowly rocking her until she stopped crying. I checked to see if her eyes were closed, and in the dim light from next room, I could see that her eyes were wide-open...and she was smiling. She looked up at me, pulled her thumb from her mouth, and whispered a happy "Hi!" She went to sleep not long after that...but then she woke up 20 minutes later- just long enough for me to get back in bed and start to doze off.

Later that same night/morning, she woke up crying and told me she wanted food. I have a big bag of individually wrapped bread rolls for just such an occasion. She asked me to unwrap the roll, and then, rather than eat it, she lay it in front of her on the bed, so she could look at it while she slept. Last night she did the same thing with a carrot stick. I've read that adopted children sometimes live in fear that they will not get their next meal. It helps to have food nearby, even if they're not hungry. How sinful and selfish do I need to be to try to bully a child like that into going back to bed quickly just so I can get to sleep?

Of course, I'm saying all this with the clarity of a full 6 hours of sleep behind me...