Well, getting him to respond isn't as easy as I thought. One of my hopes for this blog is that I can get him to open up a little bit about how it feels to be him every day. I could be asking for too much, but I hope that if I can get him to post regularly he might soften. For now, he's very aware that there's an "audience" out there.

One of the people who works with him regularly wrote me yesterday to ask about yesterday's post and sleep. Her question was - If he has so much sleep trouble (and he does - more on that in a sec) why in the world would I reward the anti-sleep behaviors by letting him stay up late and watch a movie with me?

Truman hasn't slept since he was a baby. Or I should say, he hasn't slept well since he was born. It has always been a struggle for us. To complicate it, he is on medication that can mess with sleep. We have to be very careful about when it's given so that he can begin a wind down period. It also suppresses his appetite, so he ends up not eating for a good bit of the day, but then is STARVING when it wears off. Sometimes he'll eat his way through a night. He has trouble going to sleep, staying asleep, and he'll get up for the day sometimes at hours that some people are just going to sleep. And let me tell you, unless you want everyone in the house to be up at those hours too, someone had better be getting up with him. And that someone is me since I'm the one that can afford a nap later, but that doesn't make a person feel any less terrible the next day or generally feel off kilter from the odd hours. And if I feel that way, how does he feel? And how does it affect behavior and every other little thing in his life?

All that to say, it's an incredibly valid question, and one for which I have no answer other than to plead guilty. Here are the lame excuses: #1: I am at the end of 6 days of single parenthood while Jim has been out of town, and my will is quite weak.  #2: I am just so happy that he's not running down the hall at 11pm from his room to the kitchen or worse, his room to Maeve's room an waking her up, or just not running in general. And #3: I really want to just sit down and watch some TV, for the love of all that's holy.

Now, here is the one excuse for which I won't apologize: It's a really wonderful time of night for him, and the only time that he'll really talk to me. There's a sweet spot between the medication wearing off and actual tiredness where he becomes more of himself. He'll talk to me about things that he normally would shut down about. For a moment, there is a wonderful flow of communication and sharing, whether it be about why silent movies are silent or why he thinks he's such an interesting person if he does say so himself. That is worth the price of sleepless admission right there. Don't get me wrong - I don't encourage that he stays up just so I can enjoy a little lucid time with him because I really want to just do #3 up there if I'm being honest. But when it happens, it's something that I can't even turn down.