I don’t understand why children spend the first 13 years of their lives fighting sleep, then all of a sudden they won’t get out of bed. I think it is one of life’s great unsolved mysteries. Getting Ethan to go to bed at night is a whole series of plays in the playbook… he’s hot, he’s cold, his head hurts, he is thinking bad thoughts… I was rationalizing with him, but I gave that up, that got me no where. He says ‘I can’t sleep, I am thinking bad thoughts’ to which I reply, ‘well think about good things like pizza or your scooter.’ He says ‘I can’t think good thoughts.’ ‘Of course you can,’ I say, ‘you control your mind’ to which he says ‘I can’t control my thoughts, bad thoughts come into my head and I can’t get rid of them.’ And here I realize I have no rationale for this except that he must be schizophrenic and clearly that is not the case.

His latest theory is that he is nocturnal. He said to me the other day ‘I want to stay up all night, I am nocturnal.’ I shoot back, ‘you can’t do that, you need to go to school during the day.’ Little stinker says ‘well you could home school me.’ He taxes my brain cells, there is no way I can come up with stuff fast enough for him, and he is only going to get better at it. HE WEARS ME OUT!