Sleep....

One of the hardest things to communicate to prospective parents is just how tired you are every night at 9pm....wait, make that 8:30. And how most of the time you don't even care.

A good friend of mine asked what we did for New Year's Eve and for a split second I was slightly embarrassed. The wife was snoring by 9:45pm. I made it on the computer till 12:02am. I would have knocked off at about 11pm but it was New Year's Eve after all and if there was a night to bang on the keyboard an extra hour this was it. No "Midnight Run" in Central Park in NYC. No projectile vomiting in an alley at 4am like I did after a night of severe alcohol intake about 15 years ago. Hell we didn't even bang pots or anything. For a second I thought, "Is this what our formerly exciting life has come to???"

I entered parenthood thinking that things would be different for us. Actually I remember telling my wife often that if we couldn't keep a good chunk of the life we had built for ourselves intact than I might not want to be a parent. We had such an exciting, fun time as a couple that I imagined resenting an infant or two robbing us of the ability to stay up late night doing whatever we darn well pleased...

In the end I think the transition to 8:30pm exhaustion is like a receding hairline. It happens gradually. You aren't always happy about it but it sort of feels natural. Every once in a while you resent it but then you look back and remember all the energy you devoted to your children in the last 12-14 hours and you don't wonder much further about why you're a mental zombie when the sun goes down. And if you do it doesn't matter much because you'll probably be asleep in ten minutes anyway....