Do you know where your children are?

I know one is next to me here, wide awake and watching a DVD on mute.

Why?

The summer after Carmen turned one, I remember staying up late with her.  My mom happened to be at the house, so she was up late, too.  We took short shifts or kept each other company as we rocked Carmen, pottied her, sang to her, fed her snacks.  We took her outside, inside, outside, inside.  Finally in the kitchen at nearly 2am I held her away from my body and looked at her, all cheeks and light, downy tufts of Lyle Lovett hair, then asked in exasperation, “What?!???”

“What?” The little babe answered back, and then she blinked.

What?  Who knows. 

I snuggled with her on the couch and inserted a DVD–Rachel of Signing Time, we’ll love you forever–and Carmen watched the smiling faces and signing children until her eyes finally, slowly, dropped.

I see now that once in a blue moon Carmen has nights like this, although it’s been a long while since she’s been up so late.  When the late nights happen we notice that Carmen is suddenly different, restless from the vitality of new discoveries and ideas.  Tonight she wants to talk but I hush her, hoping that she will discover sleepiness from monotony of sitting in the dark at 2am watching, on mute, one of the more uninteresting DVDs in our collection.

Well over an hour into the experiment, she’s still awake.

It’s not that she isn’t tired; she is.  Lying in the bed, surrounded by darkness, she kicked her feet and cried out of frustration.  She scratched her mosquito bites and threw the blankets.  In the chair now, she holds a cup of warm tea while she slouches lower and lower.  “Can I watch another DVD?” she asks.

Sleep, baby, sleep.