Megan’s parents tell me that, as an infant, she only needed a 10-minute catnap to recharge her baby batteries for hours and hours of cooing calamity. In desperation, many a Maine night would find Megan’s dad packing her into the car and driving around for a while. The solitary darkness of those New England back roads coupled with the soothing motion of the car always lulled her to sleep (so long as the car never stopped moving). An interesting side effect of this tactic is that Adult Megan is no good on long car trips. An excellent short-trip co-pilot and navigator, she is rendered comatose when on a highway for more than 15 minutes. Of course, while this kind of stinks for me (the driver) on the surface, it does offer me the opportunity to tune the radio to my station of choice.

My parents like to point out that, for the first eight years of my life, I didn’t sleep. Basically, I got by on about three hours a night. The rest of my twilight time was spent scurrying about the house in an Army-style crawl or running around the neighborhood, climbing trees and catching moths. In fact, there is a cadre of parents of my childhood friends who share a similar experiences while having me “sleep” over their house. They’d tuck me and my friend in after an evening of horseplay and, after settling down to read a book or watch Moonlighting (or V on one occasion I recall), they’d catch some movement out of the corner of their eye. On closer inspection, they’d find Boyhood John hiding behind the couch or under the coffee table, wide awake and brimming with energy. As I got older, I slept more and more, so much so that I’d sleep through my 12:30 classes in college. Still, my parents reveled in speaking of my sleep-shunning youth, remarking that I’d have a child just like me someday.

And in fact, Hazel is a lot like both Megan and I. During sunlight hours, she is definitely a Megan mirror, napping for just 15 minutes or so at a time. And when it comes to bed time, she surely fights sleep like I did, requiring a little finesse on our part to bring on the slumber. The real trick is to get her to settle down enough to consider sleep.This usually entails walking the house from one end to the other, holding her and rocking her. Sometimes this will be enough to get her snoring, but usually you need to go on to Stage Two: The Rocking Chair In Her Room. While formulaic at first, Megan and I proceed differently from Stage Two forward. Megan has great success with white noise, utilizing a small table fan we keep in the room. I, however, get bored using this technique, instead favoring signing to Hazel. I try to stick to children’s songs at first, but other songs elbow to my mental foreground, demanding to be sung. And so Hazel is entertained (into sleeping - which may not speak well for these artists) by The Beatles, They Might Be Giants, Wolf Parade, Interpol (edited), Tenacious D (severely edited), and many, many TV theme songs.

Concerning the latter: I can usually successfully get by with any theme song, but the Ducktales song consistently ruins Hazel, bringing on wails of distraught anguish. I still need to figure this phenomenon out, though I know it isn’t strictly content related, since when I melodically list the names of characters from the show, she digs. More experiments are needed before bringing this to the AAP.