Before I became a parent there were things I swore I’d never do when I was a parent only to find, rather quickly, that the type of expertise I thought I possessed before children was a total crock.

I knew nothing.

And the more the kids grow, the less I know.

Lately my current list of failures has become a full page, single spaced document in 10-point font. Just a few days ago my husband and I hovered around a homework page like we were back in high school algebra and wondered when the heck they changed second grade math?

“Edie, you’re just going to have to tell your teacher we couldn’t understand the directions,” my husband said handing our seven-year-old back her pages, an act that nearly broke him. I shoved a marshmallow in my mouth and asked our kindergartner if she had anything to color because I know I’m good at staying in the lines and bad at figuring out how to get supper on the table before bedtime. Frozen pizza anyone?

When the girls were little, I spent a lot of time trying to start good habits for us all. I mean, they were so fresh to the world the idea of totally screwing it up in the first few years was daunting. Everyone in my family teases my brother-in-law for asking the hospital if they had softer washcloths for his newborn baby, “like something made of silk maybe,” because she was so tiny and her skin was so delicate. I didn’t blame him for asking, I probably would have asked too if I would have thought of it.

Oh, how quickly they go from itty bitty, fragile little burritos to piling up the wreckage of their bikes on the dirt trail heading to their cousin’s and coming in crying, bleeding and covered from head to toe in dust. How quickly they go from copying your every move to requesting you change out of your Crocs before dropping them off at school.

How quickly I got comfortable going out in public in Crocs.

Anyway, I’m thinking about this today because our family is working on a solution to something I thought I’d have mastered before my youngest daughter turned one. But here we are, five years later, and my darling little almost-six-year-old will not go to bed on her own. And by go to bed I mean fall asleep and stay asleep under her own covers without her dad’s arm around her, her little head nestled in his pit, her favorite spot in the world.

Now I’m going on record here to blame this situation all on my husband. Because I had that girl sleep trained before she moved out of her crib, but once that man started laying down next to her for a story at night there was no returning to the land of the awake-past-8pm. I mean, I understand, he’s tired. He does manual labor, he’s in the elements all day. And the room is dark, the sound machine is on, but darling dear husband we all know that regardless of the state of awake our child is, you’re out for the count by 8:30 pm. You might as well change out of your full Carhart ensemble before you open “Chicken Little.”

 My sister-in-law, who had a similar situation with her youngest, suggested having my two daughters sleep together at night, something they are happy to do at sleepovers with the relatives but is somehow less appealing at home. So when my husband was at a meeting past bedtime, I put both girls in bed together, read a story, turned out the lights, gave them a few snuggles and escaped from between them when their breathing turned to tiny snores. “This will work. I’ll just ease them into this,” I thought as I headed upstairs to begin tucking myself in for the night. But halfway through my face washing routine I heard a door creak and a set of small footsteps heading toward me, and then a cry and then a wail and then I was standing at the top of the stairs looking down on sisters angrily explaining a train of events that can only be described as a full-on sleep fight. I mean, I’m not positive my oldest was even awake when she angrily called her little sister a “big meanie” for attempting to use her arm as a blanket.

“Well, that escalated quickly,” I thought to myself while I followed them both back to bed to wait for the return of daddy’s armpit. 

Anyway, if you need me, I’ll be studying second grade math and Googling “sleep training for five-year-olds.” And I’ll probably be doing it all in Crocs, using my embarrassing wardrobe choices as payback because I’m out of ideas…