THE BATHROOM CATCH-22

So we didn't get around to cleaning up the kids' bath toys last night, something I didn't notice until I was about to enter the shower for my morning hosing-off. Thought that seeing as my shower happens at 2:45 in the morning, it would be quieter for all concerned if I didn't try moving any toys until after getting into the shower because inevitably I drop something so maybe the shower will cover the noise and...

...okay, Her Awesomeness is out of bed and giving me That Look. So much for my theory. Another fine mess created by yours truly.

WUV...TWUE WUV

Scientists discover true love goes the headline in the Times of London.

Brain scans have proved that a small number of couples can respond with as much passion after 20 years as most people exhibit only in the first flush of love.

The findings overturn the conventional view that love and sexual desire peak at the start of a relationship and then decline as the years pass.

Is it me or do the first and second paragraphs contradict each other? If it's only a small number of couples who are this lucky, then isn't the conventional view pretty much intact?

Would dearly like to see their findings cross-referenced with how much sleep these folks get. Her Awesomeness and I can be as oh-lord-get-a-room affectionate as anybody, but not after a week of little ones waking up at 1:30 in the morning with gastric issues.

I WANT TO KNOW HOW THEY DO IT

So I get home at 1:30 today, which I figure gives me just enough time for a quick nap before I head back out on my other errands in this insanely compressed day. No message on the machine or my phone, so I can lie down here on the couch and--

RRRRRRING. RRRRRRRING.

The eye doctor. And then Nana. Aaaaand my wife.

How do they do this? How do they know? What sort of fiendish conspiracy is this, I ask you?

UP AT 12:30

Celebrated the kids going to bed early just a little soon. They started waking in shifts starting at 12:30. Beast, scared of something. Noodle, potty. Beast, scared of something else.

I am told this is what happens as children's imaginations develop. We will have to teach Beast in particular how to be a brave little bear.

A SWELL FIRST WEEK BACK AT WORK

Tuesday: Noodle nightmare at 1:30, insisted on staying up to see me off to work at 3:00.
Wednesday: Noodle nightmare at 1:00.
Thursday: Beast urpage at 2:30.

My new co-workers must be wondering what they've gotten into with this baggy-eyed thing that comes schlepping into the station to do the news.

I REMEMBER THAT GLARF BLARGLE FEELING

When the daughter wakes up at 1:30 with a nightmare and then wants to stay up because she wants to see you off to work at 3:00 and then work's okay but the drive home is a sodden clog of pointless traffic lights, and I swear there's a sensor that tells people to get on the phone and call me just as I'm drifting off into a nap...

...if anybody in the service sector is reading this, PLEASE. We in the non-9-to-5 world would rather you email us instead of calling so that we're not jarred awake by ringing phone at all hours of the day...

Gaaaah. I'm a moron. Forgot to get the milk on the way home, of course. And now it's time for Noodle's dance class and throb throb throb goes my head, where in the name of all that is holy is the Advil?

THE OLD TRENCHERMAN HAS LOST A STEP

No longer can I gorge on Thanksgiving as in days of yore...not with child-hoisting and mom-corralling and order-taking and whatnot. So before you go believing any urban legends, it's not the tryptophan that'll make you sleepy, and it's not the Detroit Lions. It's just plain old garden-variety exhaustion, added to in my case by all the new-job-running-around-filling-out-paperwork behavior.

You: go to Boogershoppe. Me: go to sleep.

SNUGGLED

Noodle and her cousin Lil are finally asleep in their bed, as is Sweetness in his room. You could shoot an insurance-company commercial with them right now, they look so content.

Hope the poor girl doesn't get to find out what an active sleeper Noodle is.

ERASMUS B. DRAGON IN THE HOUSE

Beast and Noodle were up for random reasons repeatedly last night - I can't find Ramone! says the boy, I had a bad dream Daddy and now I need a dream about feeding a baby calf says Noodle, and so on and so forth. Me, I can skate by vegging with Beast during the day, but my darling wife has to go to work and grocery shop what with Cousin Lil coming by for the weekend. Thus the title of this post, with apologies to the Car Talk guys.

Couple new tracks from The Kids' Playlist, though.

Noodle:

Strike The Bell and House Party - both Dan Zanes

Beast:

Home By The Sea - Genesis (the "sit down, sit down, SIT DOWN" part in particular)
Rock Steady - Aretha Franklin

THEY SLEPT ALL NIGHT

Both of them. On time.

Will wonders never cease?

Beast is usually no problem at all, being the low-maintenance relaxed Dude he is...wish he wasn't so relaxed about getting to the potty on time, though. Noodle, on the other hand, has a brain that operates on a whole 'nother level. No way is she sleeping when something interesting is happening in the house, even if it's just one of their hair-trigger toys switching on for no reason. This time she went right out without kvetching or stalling or anything. I tried motivating her by saying the only way she'd get to give mommy bye-bye kisses before she left for work was to go to sleep early, so we'll see if that works in about 33 minutes. There's also the second motivating factor of her Mémère coming over after lunch so I can take Her Awesomeness to the podiatrist. All that distance running has left my darling with an owie that requires expert attention, and because she may have to be off her feet tonight there is a possibility we will splurge and...order a pizza.

And that will be its own drama. Beast pulls the cheese off his pizza and then doesn't eat much of the remaining slice before demanding another, and Noodle likes hers cold. Weirdo.

29 minutes. We'll see what happens.

GLARB? FARF NORGLE VOBBERPLOP

If it's seeming more incoherent than usual around here, that's because Noodle kept us up for a couple hours in the middle of the night with the full gamut of five-year-old stalling tricks: Potty. Water. Scared. Fan on. Fan off. Can't find one of the massive phalanx of stuffed pugs she sleeps with. And potty again. Lather, rinse, repeat, from 1:30 until 3:30 this morning.

Let's see what the National Sleep Foundation has to say:

Some children learn that saying they are afraid is an effective stalling tactic or a way to avoid bedtime. On the other hand, some children and adolescents with sleep issues really have an anxiety disorder...

Nice straddle, guys. Either it's stalling or it's a visit to another doctor? (eyeroll) Thanks. (/eyeroll)

ONE NIGHT AWAY AND IT'S ALL SHOT

We finally had Noodle getting to sleep by herself, but last weekend she slept with Mommy for one night while we were away at the great-grandfather's big 90th birthday celebration. And now she's back howling at night and can't get to sleep without one of us there, or until she's completely fried from 90 minutes of bawling. So we're trying the pick-her-up don't-say-anything put-her-back-in-bed routine, and so far we have some very sore backs to show for it, but little in the way of success.

Beast, meanwhile, sleeps through all of this drama. We hope.

BEDTIME WIG-OUT II: LI'L KRAKATOA

Oy, Noodle was at it again this evening. Wonderful 'til bedtime and then came the eruption, this time with twitching and bucking and say, do you think Father T would mind doing an exorcism before he retires? Is Max von Sydow still alive? (At press time, yes.)

THE OTHER SHOE

The kids came home and were wonderfully sweet at dinner. Even washed their hands without needing to be asked. Didn't get picky about their food and Beast didn't use his cup of chocolate milk as a fingerbowl...much. Got through bath time without a hitch even though I had to zoom out for an hour for a radio station event that coincided with their baths. Got them in their jammies without fighting, cuddled and read them their stories, got them to the potty, and then...from out of nowhere...

An hour of squalling from Beast and 90 minutes of it from Noodle. What. The. Heck?

NEW BED FOR BEAST

We were hoping to transition the little guy from his crib straight to a big-boy bed, just like we did with Noodle - but later this year, when we could better afford a new mattress. Alas, the crib rail gave way today and there's no way we're dealing with the idiots at Delta Crib any more. The suck, they are. Nice solid wooden crib...crappy plastic parts holding it together. We had complained to them earlier that one of their crib rail guides had fallen apart on us, they first said they could only send us a replacement for ten bucks or some ridiculous amount of money for a six-inch piece of plastic. Then, when we mentioned the magic words "Consumer Product Safety Commission", they got a part right out to us.

It was the wrong part.

We grumbled and locked the crib rail in the highest possible position until such time as we could afford the new mattress, and that worked fine until this morning. Off I go to Kingston to find a new toddler bed. Let's see, there's a crappy plastic Dora bed, a crappy plastic Cars bed, and waaaay in the back a plain white old-school tubular steel bed for 15 bucks cheaper than anything else.

Done. The assembly was fairly sane, and Beast is loving his new bed, plus there's a lot more floor space in his room. So fark, so good. He may decide wander off into the kitchen for a beer at 1 in the morning, but we'll handle that contingency as it comes.

In the meantime, I've hidden the opener. It's someplace where I won't be able to find it when I could really use a beer. (IT'S UNDERNEATH YOUR OLD GLASSES, MORON. There. That should do nicely.)

VOICES IN THE NIGHT

"EWW - WHO DID THAT?"

Death betide the manufacturers of talking toys with motion sensors that trigger whenever a squirrel breaks wind in the next town over. Like this thing from the imps at Tonka:Cute? Oh, we thought so when Santa brought it to Beast for Christmas. But it won't. shut. up. At 1:30 in the morning...

"LOOK...GARBAGE!"

"THAT STINKS!"

Which naturally terrifies Herman, who's already inclined to flip out at the slightest provocation. Here's this skinny little ten-pound cat, who somehow makes the noise of a team of Clydesdales when he's running around in a panic. His chubbier sister? Stone feline predatory silence. At any rate, the end result of the toy-triggered commotion is the same - a rude awakening from another one of those dreams where I'm telling Katherine Heigl and Scarlett Johansson to stop fighting over me because I am very much already spoken for, thank you very much.

MILESTONES APLENTY

Noodle went to sleep solo for the tenth night last night, so she gets her new ladybug backpack, and a soccer ball she does not want to share with Beast until we explained to her that you need somebody to kick the ball back to you, and who better than a two-and-a-half-year-old with boundless energy?

We're also done with her GoodNites, and hopefully for good!

NIGHT NUMBER TEN

This is it. Noodle attempts to go for the big prize by falling asleep by herself for the tenth night.

I missed the success of night nine due to a voice-over seminar at my old high school in Rhinebeck - a place I completely don't recognize since its expansion a few years ago, even though I attended school there for five years and even ran the summertime paint crew for a couple years. The paint jobs are holding up nicely after 22 years, too. I wandered around disoriented like one of the grouchy alte kackers who only sets foot in the school once a year to vote "no" on the school budget. ("I don't have kids in the schools, why should I pay?" To which on the AM station's old talk show I would respond "My dad's dead and never collected a dime from Social Security - where's my 50% payroll tax cut?" Just to rile them and listen to them splutter.)

And then a couple of the friendly students? teachers? pointed me in the right direction.

Bottom line from the seminar: voiceover work is a pretty sweet gig if you can get it, but it takes a lot of hustle to get over that first big hump and my area of expertise doesn't necessarily give me that much of an edge.

(Welcome to my Wall Street Journal forum readers! There are more than one of you, yes?)

SIX DOWN, FOUR TO GO

Noodle's really getting the hang of this falling-asleep-solo thing! And that's even with the bummer news that the Memere had a bad cold and wouldn't be joining us at the Chuck E. Cheese or wherever it is we're going tomorrow.

We're also psyched here in Boogerland, because today I got my first hack posted over at the mighty parenthacks.com! Not that it's any amazing work of genius; I merely suggested a clip-on hat lamp would work wonders if you're in a situation like ours where the light from one kid's room keeps the other kid awake at bedtime, but turning out the lights straightaway would be a tantrum-maker. Here's the whole story, along with linkage to the one place I found that had the lamps if you're averse to grabbing them from the point-of-purchase rack at your local Wal-Mart.

WE'RE HALFWAY THERE

Five nights of Noodle falling asleep solo. Five more to go and she gets her prize. After that? Rut roh.

So she set foot inside her future elementary school for the first time today, and loved it. An hour of story-time, and since she's already taller than some of the second graders she looks like she fits right in. Her Awesomeness and I did the meet-and-greet with the principal and the head of the local PTA, and due to my goofy radio-guy schedule I was the only dad in the room. As a result, I could feel some of the moms' eyes boring into me from behind. At least that's what I think was happening, because it's highly unlikely they were checking me out. It could have been that the sunlight through the cafeteria windows was hitting my super-sexy bald spot at just the right angle and they were squinting from the glare.