Sometimes, it’s good to brag on your kids. There are times that you’ve worked so hard for something, spent time, effort, or money on making something work, and it all finally clicks. But if you’re like me, sometimes you may brag a little early. 

Recently, my youngest has been going through an awful phase (it is just a phase, right?) of sleeping for an unpredictable number of hours at night. I don’t mean, “Oh, it could be 8 or 10 or 12 hours.” It’s more like whether he will sleep through the night, or get up three times. He can sleep 12 hours in a row, several nights in a row. And then one night it’ll all go away. Like magic, he reverts back into a newborn schedule. In my opinion, even though you’re more well-rested, it’s harder to get up in the night after you’ve had that few nights of good sleep.

So now, every time someone asks “How is he sleeping?” I’m unsure how to answer. I don’t want to complain. The bags under my eyes do that all on their own. But I don’t want to jinx myself either, if the night before happened to be a good one. I’ve learned that any time I say out loud that he’s sleeping better, I’ll have the night from hell to pay for it. For instance, we had three good nights in a row, Thursday, Friday and Saturday night of last week. On Sunday night, our small group got together, and because we’d been asking them to pray for good rest in our home, they all asked how he had been doing. “Great!” we replied. “Three wonderful nights in a row of the baby sleeping all night!” Sunday night, you might have predicted, he was up four times, including once where I just fell asleep in the rocker with him on my chest for two hours.

The moral of the story seems to be something along the lines of “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.” Not that I’m counting chickens, but I suppose I won’t say he’s sleeping well until he’s in middle school and I’ve got to dump cold water on him to wake him. I guess I won’t be mentioning that our daughter hasn’t worn diapers in a week, and we haven’t had any accidents…