Terminator Baby

The KGB loved it, the Japanese favoured it in the PoW camps of World War Two and here, in a quiet corner of Derry, my one year old is using the age old sleep deprivation technique to torture us. We call it 'Torture by Baby'.
The child, that's him pictured above, is not unlike the Terminator. He hasn’t slept a full night for over two months, and still he keeps on trucking, relentless, leaving us to steer this beat out, sleep deprived juggernaut along the road of parenthood bleary eyed and disorientated.
The child wakes us at 1am every night and no amount of work or cajoling will get him back to sleep before 4.30am. We have tried, quite literally, everything – tough love, controlled crying, begging, praying, offering money – nothing works. He wakes the entire house religiously every night.
Getting through a day while only having clocked up three hours shut eye is no joke. And as this form of torture leaves no physical marks on people, the perpetrator, I mean child, comes away looking cute while we carry around bags the size of bin liners under our eyes.
We weren’t all that with it before, but lack of sleep has left us totally unable to act and think coherently. Take for example last night – a night when the madness that blights the O’Neill household was on full and proud display.
At midnight the dog barked maniacally in the kitchen. The husband woke up (for this was during one of the short 30 minute bursts of actually sleep we did get to relish) and shouted at the top of his voice to no one in particular: “Who’s that barking?”
To which I, quite sensibly, replied, “It’s the dog.” At which point he came back with a “are you sure?” Yes, I’m sure. Unless our older children have been driven so mad with sleep deprivation they have taken to impersonating household pets to express their displeasure at the situation, I’d say that was definitely the dog.
Thirty minutes later the oldest child woke up shouting for me in his usual alarmist manner. I stumbled across the toy strewn obstacle course that is our landing and made inquiries as to what the matter was and told him that unless he was informing me an axe-wielding lunatic was in the house I would rather prefer if the matter could possibly wait till a more reasonable hour.
“You know that blind man who we talked to at Sainsbury’s today?” he asked.
“Yip,” said I.
“His dog, the guide dog. He brings the blind man home, takes him across the road, sees for him?
“Yip,” said I.
“What if the dog goes blind too?” he asked.
“Well Dan, that would indeed be an unfortunate turn of events,” said I. “I suppose the guide dog would have to get a guide dog himself. Good night.”
And off to bed I went for a grand total of 45 minutes until the alarm went off.
We will not be broken by these methods of torture, we will not give in. We may be half the people we were when we first started off on this road to parenthood, our children may have rendered us half-wits but we will survive. We will overcome.