From the Inmates are Running the Asylum department:

THIS is what 3 a.m. looks like at the Costello house, a diminutive red brick three-story in the West Village: On the second floor, Harrison, age 5, is splayed, sideways and snoring, across his parents’ king-size, Anglo-Indian four-poster, having muscled his mother out completely and pushed his father, Paul, a 35-year-old photographer, to the extreme edge of the bed. Sara Ruffin Costello, the style director of Domino magazine, is upstairs in her 3-year-old daughter Carolina’s bed, which is a hammered-metal four-poster queen dressed in pink paisley sheets with a ruffle. “It is the bed I would have if I were single,” Ms. Costello, 38, said. “It is my dream bed, which is a good thing because I spend a lot of time in it.” Harrison’s bed, his fourth, a trundle model from Ikea, is empty and pristine, the least-used space in the house.

The crux:

“By the time I get into bed at night,” she said, “I’ve really had it. I can’t spend from 1 to 3 in the morning running back and forth, moving them back to their beds. I will tell you that my daughter does kick and spin. My husband will swear she pulls the chest hairs out of his chest. But if I don’t make an issue out of this, I do — we do — get a decent amount of sleep, at least six hours.”

Delayed gratification is the key. Make friends with it. Learn to love it. Delayed gratification tells you to drive a used car and save up for a new one. Delayed gratification tells you to invest the time and sleeplessness now with your three year old so you’re not doing it later (and much, much worse) with your thirteen year old.

Source: New York Times