Late Nights

Hannah is our first child. DW and I have not been subjected to the utter exhaustion that comes with years of sleep deprivation. I can remember some of what happens at night.
Hannah is like most children I suppose, she has so much fun with mommy and daddy that is just too exciting to go to sleep at night. At any moment during the night that she finds herself alone, she must seek out and find mommy and sometimes daddy. As parents, we construct obstacle courses to keep our children where we want them. We say we want to keep them safe or to keep them from getting into something that may hurt them, but what we really want is some time to regain our sanity. Our children love us so much that they don't understand why we would EVER want to be away from them, so they traverse every obstacle ever at their own peril to be with us, lovable, no?
Not too long ago, Hannah was sick and she stopped sleeping through the night and mommy would visit her with comfort. Since then, Hannah has not wanted to sleep in her own bed. And she has seen fit to conquer everything we throw at her to keep her in her bed. First, she learned to crawl over the wall of her bed and lower herself down to the ground (excellent muscle strength and control.) Next it was the door, no problem here, she can easily reach up and turn the knob. So we added a baby gate, "Ha," says Hannah, "I can crawl over that with more ease than my bed." So we turned the baby gate around and raised it off the floor. If you think that will stop a child, you are mistaken, she pushed it over. Next in total darkness, came the pit of alligators and the maze that is the distance between our room and hers. Another baby gate pulled, not pushed down, a simple door and the climb onto our bed and she was home free. Another night of sleep lost...
We got a baby gate that we could cinch to the wall. Now this was truly an impossible task. Like usual, she climbed her bed wall, opened the door and found an impenetrable path. So she began calling for us, and using every vocabulary word she could think of. At first it started with "Mommy!" "Daddy!" "Baby!" Then she became more sophisticated expressing things couldn't do from her room, "pooh pooh" "peepee" "take bath" "wash hands" "juice" Thinking her friends might help her, she called for "Stanley" "Addy" "Ella" She then reverted to tugging at our heartstrings "love you" "hold me" It was more than a parent can bear as I stood outside her door hoping she would fall back asleep. Every time she would get up, I would take her and put her back in bed. Thus I stood outside her door waiting for her to get up and come to the door. This technique took probably 30 minutes the first night we tried it, 10 minutes the second night and maybe five minutes the third night before she would fall gently back to sleep. This worked until we threw our world in tail spin by going on vacation...We'll start again when we are home, but for now, Happy Thanksgiving!