Scott Alexander

The rest is just fake drinking to buy time.

Finally, I put him in bed, and he immediately starts crying.

All the how-to-be-a-parent books say that you should just let the toddler cry it out, and he'll eventually learn to sleep on his own.

Unfortunately, Kai has been reading the how-to-be-a-toddler books, and they all say that you should never under any circumstances stop crying, because then your parents will think they won't, and that they can sometimes get away with not doing what you want.

So we're at an impasse.

Usually after 15 or 30 minutes, my wife or I repeats lulling time.

and this time maybe it sticks.

Here's a page of Dr Seuss' Hop on Pop.

It shows the two little Dr Seuss characters playing a game of tennis.

It says, Day play.

We play all day.

And then the next page shows the two characters hitting each other with tennis rackets in the bed.

Night fight.

We fight all night.

Scott captions it, Dr Seuss' Hop on Pop has esoteric levels that only real parents will understand.

You may notice that one of the twins gets more billing in this piece than the other.

I promise I'm not trying to play favourites, but our parental division of labour is that when they have different needs, I take Kai and my wife takes Lyra, so I spend more time with him and I know him better.

And Kai has inherited my hyper-verbosity, and Lyra her mother's circumspection, so it's hard to get a read on her.

But also the twins have spontaneously decided that, in the comedy of life, Kai will be the wise guy and Lyra the straight man.

As such, there's less about her to make fun of.