sleeping in the bed

BY DAN INDANTE

Like most parents, when we first brought our daughter home from the hospital, she slept in a bassinet next to our bed. By that time, I was 35 and already getting up every hour on the hour to hit the bathroom, so listening to her squawk a couple times a night didn't bother me. Compared to my prostate, which was actually bigger than her, the crying was a minor inconvenience.

There was something oddly soothing about having our baby sleep in the same room. Maybe it's because my wife would spend most of her time with the kid and leave me the hell alone. More likely, it was because, when our girl was sleeping in her own room, my wife slapped me in the head every seven minutes saying "What was that? Is the baby crying?" Fortunately, half the time she swung at me I was already in the bathroom. Peeing. Again.

Anyway, I'm not sure when, but at some point my daughter graduated from sleeping next to our bed to sleeping IN our bed. Maybe it was my fault -- night after night of falling asleep on the couch after watching 16 straight hours of SportsCenter probably gave my little girl the opening her little 3-year-old mind needed to entirely shut down whatever remained of my and my wife's sex life. (Speaking of that, I'm getting a little sick and tired of my kids watching 16 straight hours of Disney Channel every weekend. Where did they learn that?)

But regardless of the reasons, my daughter flat-out moved in. And kids don't just come into the bed and fall asleep. No, they need to kick you in the face, elbow you in the mouth, and pee a little on your pillow before they get real comfortable. I've been in street fights where I absorbed less punishment. The second she closed her eyes, her limbs would start jerking around like The Flying Wallendas. Half the time, I'd wake up sucking HER thumb. Plus, can somebody explain to me the reason that children need to sleep diagonally, spread eagle? How in God's name could a 36-inch long child require so much space that we could barely fit a pillow on our king-size bed?

Naturally, we started to get tired of this whole deal. Every psychologist on the planet says that you should get the kid out of your bed before age 4. Of course, Tom Cruise tells us that all of those psychologists are full of shit, so how can we really believe them? Still, we tended to agree that having our 3-year-old co-star with us in a surreal version of Three's Company wasn't going to work out well for anybody.

So, because we're horrendous parents with backbones resembling Play-Doh, we decided to bribe her rather than do what the shrinks tell us: i.e., kick her out of the bed and just listen to her cry for a couple nights. (Viva Tom Cruise!!!) In a stroke of genius, we figured that if we turned her bedroom into a toddler paradise, she'd actually want to sleep in there. I turned that goddamned room into a circus. Part princess shrine, part Barnum & Bailey, the only thing it was missing was a bearded lady. For sure, my daughter was going to want to be in that bedroom rather than the adult one that always had a documentary or Shark Week playing on TV.

The same day I finished putting in the popcorn machine and the lion cage in her room, I dragged myself back into my own room and, what d'ya know, my daughter's crashed out on our bed, snoring louder than a lumber camp, and drooling a bucket's worth of spit on my new down comforter.

While the whole situation was a big pain in the butt, I was still able to handle it up until the day I got a 60-inch TV in my bedroom. At that point, I clearly wasn't watching the 11:00 p.m. SportsCenter on that microscopic piece of shit 52-incher in the living room. Our girl had to go.

With Chris Berman as my motivation, I sucked it up and planted the little monster in her bedroom every night at 8:00, listening to her scream bloody murder. And then I'd plant her there every hour after that when she'd wander back in to our room. The second time around, the screaming would get so loud, I half expected a SWAT team to show up in our cul-de-sac. Nevertheless, although she had a couple conversations with her family law attorney confirming that punitive damages were unavailable, she stopped the shrieking about a week later. My next door neighbor sent me a thank you card, and I had to come up with a new excuse not to have sex with my wife. Anybody else want to sleep in our room?