My Son Doesn't Sleep

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This past January, Enzo slept in the living room with Dad while down with the stomach bug. It was the third time in his life he slept through the night.

After Alba was born, most of my adult friends assumed I wasn't sleeping. Of course, that was true in the first months, when babies wake to eat a thousand times a night. But since we trained her at six months (i.e., let her scream for three nights until she realized the world was a cruel, dark place and her parents weren't coming), she has slept like a world champion. Every night, she hits the pillow and doesn't budge for 10 hours.

Enzo, on the other hand, is a nightmare—literally. Something will startle me awake in the pitch-black darkness, and, thinking a burglar's gotten into the house, I scramble for my baseball bat or a pocketknife, only to discover it's the second child demanding milk or reciting his numbers at a volume equivalent to the decibel levels after a Tennessee touchdown inside Neyland Stadium.

Haley and I took a lot of pride in Alba's ability to sleep through anything. In conversation with other parents at the park or gym, we feigned empathy as they lamented how their toddlers would wake them multiple times a night. They hadn't slept in years, they said. Meanwhile, Haley and I were getting Alba down before 7:30 p.m., making popcorn, watching movies, cranking out a cool 8 hours of sleep, and getting up to make coffee and sip it quietly on the couch together while reflecting on the goodness of God's creation. It was well past seven before we even heard a peep from our daughter’s room.

Then along came Enzo, a child impervious to sleep training. Rather than accept his lonely fate, as his older sister had, he would scream from the second he awoke, at any point between midnight and 6 a.m., until one of us zombie-walked in to bounce him, rub his back, and offer a conciliatory bottle of milk. Because we were so nervous that his condition would infect the champ, and our house didn't have enough room for him to be on his own, we stuffed him in a pack-and-play and relegated him to the guest bathroom. I'm sure, now, that's what did us in.

Obviously, we felt bad about evicting him from two bedrooms (ours and Alba's), so we started answering his middle-of-the-night calls with a warm bottle of milk. Nearing his first birthday, I was teaching two classes on top of my regular job at UT. We were selling our house and in the market for another one in a quieter neighborhood, and Lionel Messi's last World Cup was about to kick off. So, we continued giving in, even after we'd settled into the new house in Halls, where Enzo was given his own room because Haley decided that the best way to celebrate Argentina's World Cup victory was with another baby (to be fair, I put up little resistance).

By that point, we were putting Enzo down with a full bottle of milk, hoping that would fill his belly and keep him asleep. We were tired, so tired. But the plan didn't work. Instead, he’d squeal, I'd walk in, and he'd lift his empty bottle before I even made it to his crib. "Más weche," he'd say in broken Spanish, placing it in my hand like I was his personal milk delivery man.