SLEEPIN' LIKE A MAN
(DOO-AH-DOO)

Lillian, age six-this-month, likes to sleep in bed with us. Sometimes she decides she's too old for this and that she should sleep in "her" bed, meaning downstairs in the double bed that she and Francie are supposed to share. She makes plans to sleep alone.

Eventually, sometime during the night, she comes to her senses and gets in bed with us. It might be while we are still awake, or it might be midnight.

When she's crawling into bed with us, her feelings about her previous "big girls sleep alone" theory are similar to my feelings when my alarm goes off at four a.m. because the night before, I decided that I should get up early and clean house. Namely, "what the heck was I THINKING?" (When this happens to me, I turn off the alarm and go back to sleep.)

Lillie sleeps in her underwear. Just her underwear. This is a tradition that goes back to our two oldest children, who used to like to sleep in their underwear too, many years ago. They called this "sleeping like a man," which just shows you how Fred, my husband, dresses for bed.

There was a dance that went with it, the "sleepin' like a man" dance. The kids would do sort of an Egyptian-style stomp while chanting, "Sleepin' like a ma-an, doo, ah doo. Sleepin' like a ma-an, doo, ah doo."

The years have passed. The kids are teenagers now. The girl sleeps in pajamas--the boy sleeps in shorts and a T-shirt. Fred still sleeps the way he always did, although his resemblance to Homer Simpson is getting stronger.

But history repeats itself in Lillie, who gets in bed with us and sleeps like a man.