My oldest daughter, who is now a third grader, can go all day without noticing an ant bite on her ankle. But suddenly and without warning, the most miniscule of ant bites becomes a raging, festering, insanely itchy, massive welt that requires immediate and drastic attention right after I've tucked her into bed at night.

My youngest daughter, who is two years younger than her sister, rarely mentions her pet fish and hermit crab throughout the course of a day. She may glance at them on the way to pick out a Barbie doll, or tap on the aquariums once or twice just to say hello in the afternoon. But once I turn out the light and say, "Good night," the fish and hermit crab become the most important things in her life. If she does not feed them and give them the attention they deserve at that moment then they will surely die, and for some reason, I will have to live with that on my conscience.

Why is that adults spend a good portion of time and energy, and in many cases money trying to figure out how to get to sleep, while kids dedicate much of their formative years trying to avoid it?

My son will be four in December. As much as he'd like to pull off the con jobs his two sisters attempt night after night, sleep still pretty much overwhelms him. He is young enough to be incapacitated with a good bedtime story, a snug blanket, his Lovey, and a tasty thumb. Yet there are occasions when he instinctively fights bedtime with all his might. If he doesn't decide to go for an all out grump-fest, he'll conveniently misplace his Lovey.

This half-stuffed- bunny that has morphed over his lifetime into a slightly odiferous bacteria trap is essential to his relaxation process, and somehow he manages to lose it sometime between dinner and bedtime just about every night. I've spent a good portion of my 30s searching desperately for Lovies of varying sorts and it still baffles me each and every night. It takes real effort to lose these things.

I've found them under the couch, inside play ovens, under a mountain of stuffed animals, and outside in the backyard hanging from a tree. If my sleep didn't depend on the safe return of these things, I might not worry so much about them. But a good Lovey is irreplaceable for my kids and invaluable to my night's sleep, at least until the kid figures out the ant bite strategy and pet feeding guilt trip.

Sleep is essential to the health and happiness of kids...and their parents. One of the first great pinnacles of parenthood is when that baby sleeps through the night for the very first time. There is a joy and an overwhelming since of accomplishment for mothers and fathers when this happens. They pat themselves on the back and think to themselves, "Now I can get some sleep." Then a few years later, that baby comes strolling into Mommy and Daddy's room around 8:30 pm looking for some Calamine lotion, the fish food, and his Lovey.