Why Not To Let Your Kid Get Overtired

Because then you end up home on a Saturday night, pulling your hair out trying to get her back into her routine, which was never really much of a routine, but much more of a routine than this … whatever this is. She’s been waking every twenty minutes at night, due to a double ear infection, and from a weekend spent out with her morning until night … and now she’s just one very very tired child, almost to the point where you start to wonder if she might just be a little … “off” somehow.

It’s past midnight, and she has her arms out in front of her like a baby zombie, and she is bouncing up and down on the bed. Then she stops, squints and smiles big, and starts to pant. She’s delirious, this baby of yours. Never again will you let her get off her schedule.

And those childless friends of yours who say unnerving things like, We’ll, you can’t be a slave to her nap schedule…. to hell with them! Wish them many many months of the wrath of a teething baby.

You’re in a short pink cotton nightgown trimmed with lace. You get up, take the baby, call for the BeanPa and put on your crocks. “Let’s go,” you tell his almost-sleeping body.

“Where?” He looks at you, one eye shut. He is wearing plaid pajama pants and some dorky t-shirt.

You ignore him and stumble out the door with your breast exposed, just in time for him to ask you if you’re “Going out like that?”

You shush him and flick the strap of your nightgown back over your shoulder. The baby is looking amused in a way that suggests she might think you are taking her to an all-night playground. You strap her in the car, and the BeanPa drives.

The shadows of trees from streetlights pass over the Beannut’s face, and she watches you, eerily, from the confines of her rear-facing toddler carseat. You are getting car sick and ask the BeanPa pull over. So you switch to the front seat. Dignity is clearly not a priority here, but you are trying to recoup … something of a sense of being an evolved adult person.

“What if we get pulled over?” the BeanPa asks, eying your “outfit.”

You say nothing and look out the window. The moon is full and the Beannut begins making “Wild Indian” noises. Her hand over her mouth “ow ow ow ow” … it’s too much. This isn’t real life, you think.

The BeanPa puts his hand over yours. It’s an act of support, perhaps; you are in this together. You are now those parents. And that’s fine. Just please God make this child sleep already.

Then it starts to rain. It rains so hard that any efforts you might make to have this kid fall asleep will be dampened. Yes. That’s the word.

You return home and take her inside again under the cover of your arm. She has realized there will be no all-night playground and she starts to fuss. You hand her to the BeanPa the minute he sets foot in the door and stubbornly fall to the couch, which says, this is no longer my problem. Take her.

And he does. And she sleeps. You all do…

But it’s that wakeful, restless sleep of an overtired child and you swear … never again.