Here today... - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

Way back in the dawn of time (as far as our current understanding of the internet is concerned), there was a video of an American lawyer - randomly with a gun in a side holster - explaining the world of women to the internet-active public at large.

 

There is a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario going on with this video and a bit on How I Met Your Mother (apparently - I’ve never seen a second of that show), but it is, ostensibly, a light-hearted (and very poorly aged, both for its attitude and language - again, it was a while ago) guide to a woman’s attractiveness and how it coincides with her potential craziness. 

 

Luckily, the problematic part of that video isn’t why we’re here; it’s for the part in which he says that once you’ve “located” a woman somewhere in the “Crazy-Hot Matrix”, she can, at a moment’s notice, vanish, reappearing somewhere completely different. Essentially, forget all you know about this person - there’s a new reality and it’s here to stay. Until it isn’t.

 

That brings us to, you guessed it: parenting.

 

Late last week, after - oh - two-and-a-half years, my son had the sleep regression of all sleep regressions. He was randomly sad as I was putting him down, leading to him crying for a bit. Eventually Jess and Tallulah came home from skating and, after a few attempts of my own to comfort him, Jess took over and, eventually, he was able to settle down. Since then, we’ve restarted sleep training and, let me tell you, there have been some rough nights full of scream-crying, middle-of-the-night wake-ups, followed by lengthy bouts of scream-crying, further followed by irritable days for all (but Tallulah, who can apparently sleep through just about anything) because, of course, we’re all low on sleep.

 

My hope is that, by the time you read this column, we all have made some progress and this is another challenge done and dusted. But, going back to that seemingly unrelated preamble, something I’m learning with this parenting thing is that, basically, tomorrow is never guaranteed; obviously not in the actual life-or-death, very serious way that we know not to take for granted, but in the softer, completely unpredictable world of children.

 

As I write this, I’m fueled by what was a decent night. There were some tears to begin the night, but Cooper got to sleep relatively soon after we put him down and he slept through the night. Furthermore, he awoke on his own, with his new favourite stuffy (an octopus) outside of his crib and while he was awake and octopus-less, he was content.

 

Sounds like a win to me.

 

When Jess and I woke up, realizing that he had made it through the night, there was reason to celebrate. Not only that, but we both felt like - relatively - a million bucks after sleeping through the night after the nights we’d had. Something we’d absolutely taken for granted for quite a while had been snatched away from us and, when we had it back for one night, we realized how important it is and how we need to be appreciating it a bit more, I suppose.

 

Surely I’m not telling a lot of the parents and grandparents out there anything they don’t already know, but I know Jess and I were sitting there dumbfounded and confused by all of this, wondering how the boy we thought we knew could just reappear as someone so totally different, completely upending the order of our household, at least for a short period of time.

 

The adventures of parenting never cease to amaze, so, for the time being, I’m going to have to try and remember that whatever today is has absolutely no bearing on what tomorrow could be.