Sleep OR food

I have written, with perhaps tedious monotony, about the importance of never, ever mentioning that your child sleeps well. It is a maxim that applies almost equally well to discussing any aspect of your darling snowflake's behaviour of which you are unaccountably proud. The moment that you inform someone that your child eats well, or is never car-sick, or loves going to their swimming lessons, or always undoes their shoes before taking them off*, you will be damned, because they will immediately start doing the opposite.

You can imagine, therefore, the trepidation with which I wrote about LittleBear's New Adventures In Food. You can understand also why I had remained utterly silent on the subject of sleep, because I had (at the time) nothing bad to say about a child who was going to bed at 8pm and remaining incommunicado until past 7am.

"But PhysicsBear!" I hear you cry, "Now you've really put the kibosh on things!"

Alas, no, my friends, for the kibosh has already been well and truly put.

In the past two weeks we have had nightmares, and night terrors, and bizarre fears of a "spooky thing in my bedroom". We have had too much light, and not enough light, and a strange need for Mummy to do something about the fact that a small boy is feeling a bit too warm in the middle of the night. We have barely managed a night without a crisis of some form or another.

Even my colleagues have started to comment on the fact that I look like death warmed up as I crawl to work. Because the real joy of being woken by my son at 1:30am is not the waking up; it's the lying awake for an hour or two (or three if I'm feeling really special) waiting to see if he calls out for me again. Because my brain loves me like that.

Meanwhile, despite my happy comments that LittleBear is trying new food, and despite the probability that this would immediately jinx things... he has, in fact, continued to try new food. He has happily eaten galettes au chou, his eyes have lit up with glee on discovering the joy of properly crisp pork crackling, he has demolished cheese and bacon pancakes. He has asked to try pesto, and gnocchi, and spring rolls. More excitingly, he has simply eaten some of the new experiments, without objection, even when he's said they're only "OK". I still can't quite get over how exciting this all is.

However, I now have a new Theory Of Children. 

In the past, I had happily accepted that some children sleep well, and some children eat unfussily, and for the most part it's outside your control. What I have gradually come to notice is that these two states are mutually exclusive. You can have sleep, or you can have food, but you can't have both. This has broadly been true across my friends - if there were any who had children who ate everything and slept well, they very sensibly kept quiet.

We currently have food, but we do not have sleep.

I've enjoyed the episode of eating things, but actually, in retrospect, if I had a choice, I'd choose sleep.

Are you listening LittleBear?


* Seriously, does any child do this?