Who sleeps?

My last posting, I realize, may have given the impression that I am exasperated to an abnormal degree by child-raising.  That may be your impression, but it is certainly not mine.  I live in a village, and while it does not actually take a village to raise a child, the village environment, in which you see the same parents dealing with the same children day after day, provides ample evidence of the daytime trials that most parents face, and of the not always graceful manner in which they meet them.  Comforting it is.

Ah, but what of the night?  What happens behind closed doors, in those wee and terrible hours?  Village or not we don't all share the same house, we don't awake to each others' children.  In this, we know only what others choose to tell...until, that is, we go camping together.  In camp we do all share the same house, we do awake to each others' children, and, in anticipation, in fact, and in aftermath, we learn what we otherwise could only suspect, namely that in the face of these nighttime trials other parents do much as we do, which is to say, they freak out.

From an email exchange generated by our plans to go camping earlier this summer with a couple of other families:

• Mother 1:  "I will need the following:  1 tent (for Pack n Play and me); 1 sleeping bag (for the kid - no glow sticks included please); 1 Alec clone to address nighttime crying; 4 stiff drinks, possibly more, to get me through the first few hours of camping acclimation."
• Mother 2: "I need 4 stiff drinks to address my own nighttime crying. Our boys have been practicing all week to get their nighttime wake-ups in steady 2-hour intervals. They are ready to take the show on the road."

Ha ha!  What funny mothers, how jocular, how jovial!  In point of fact they were not kidding.  First night we had near-continuous coverage, beginning with Mother 1's number 2 son's broadcast (a lovely song called "cry it out," took us all the way through to the last dying embers of the campfire), followed by GM's wakeup-and-smell-the-bottle number.  Not to be outdone, Mother 2's number 2 came through with some very late night programming of his own.  And, as threatened, the four-year-olds made their own contribution:  put to bed in a single tent, they were redistributed to two additional ones by morning.  No adult managed more than an hour of uninterrupted sleep.  And, as usual, morning came at dawn when the Littles (the three kids between 1 and 2) all woke up and began chirping.  The second night--and in writing this I find myself surprised at the mere fact that there was a second night--we dismantled the separate tent for the not-big-enough kids but were nonetheless subject to a really impressive display of nighttime terror by one of the older boys, in addition to relatively minor disturbances by the usual chorus.

Here's the punchline:  this was our second camping trip with these same families, whom we love.