I take my drowsy baby Jonah to my room at 11:00 to feed him before bed.

By 11:15, he is totally zonked out. I kiss him, put him in his crib, and tiptoe into the kitchen, where I kiss my husband Donnie goodnight as he passes me on his way to bed.

All boys tucked in? Check! My time has arrived!

I switch out the laundry, get something to drink, and sit down to check email.

Twenty minutes pass. I hear a familiar little baby whine that quickly grows into “Waah…waaaaah….WAAAAH!”

Donnie goes in to the nursery to do his back-patting magic. It doesn’t work. He tries his cradle-hold and swaying magic. It isn’t so magical tonight. That means just one thing: Mama Time.

I lay down in our bed for Nursing Session 2. Soon, Jonah is out cold again. Donnie picks him up to carry him to bed, and says what no parent wants to hear at midnight.

“His diaper leaked.”

So we double-team and change him as quickly as we can, trying hard to adhere to the excellent advice we learned when our oldest was an infant: always keep nighttime different from daytime. Don’t interact with a baby any more than necessary when you’re trying to get him to sleep. Keep the lights dim, your voices low, and try not to speak unless you have to.

Jonah is wide-awake and works hard to lure us into playing with him. He grins, laughs, throws out some Mamas and Dadas. It is hard to keep a straight face.

At this point, the only thing that might work is for me to become the human pacifier again. So we lay down in my dark, quiet bedroom. He nurses, but by this point, the well is running a little dry. He fusses; I pass him off to dad. Jonah’s cries grow angrier, so I schlep off to the kitchen to make him a bottle.

Four ounces of warm formula later, his heavy eyelids close. He sighs and I feel him start to relax in my arms.

Then my nose begins to tickle.

“No! Not a sneeze! Not now!” I think as the tickle magnifies and Jonah goes totally limp in my arms.

I reach up to pinch my nose, but I’m a second too late. “Ah—CHOO!!!”

Dozing Donnie bolts upright and exclaims, “What was that?” And Jonah sits up, too.

“I sneezed.” I can’t help giggling.

“Oh. I thought something crashed into the house,” Donnie mumbles as he falls back onto his pillow.

I lay down with a wide-awake again Jonah, his Royal Cuteness tucked between me and his drowsy father. It is so dark in our room, lit only by the faintest golden glow from the bathroom nightlight. Jonah’s pale face reflects the glow like a tiny, perfect moon, and his eyes are wide, black circles staring up at me, trying to engage me again. I can’t help but smile, and he starts chatting.

He sounds like the little night owl he is, his voice echoing loudly through the still house.

“Hoo. OOOH. Oooh. HOO. Oooooooooooooooh.”

That gets no reaction, so he flops over onto his back and switches it up.

“Da. Dada. DaaaaDAH! DUH-dah. DehDehDehDeh….DAD.”

I’m stifling giggles and wondering how Donnie is sleeping through this.

Then Jonah runs through it all again at a whisper. “Daah…dah dah…duh-da. Dada.”

His chit-chat goes on and on, and I am pretty firmly convinced that the child is just not going to sleep tonight.

“Hoooo Dat! Oh HOO Dat!” He is hollering like the world’s littlest New Orleans Saints Fan.

I manage to swallow my laughter and lay still and quiet. I recall reading that a sleeping infant will match his breathing to his mother’s. So I start breathing heavily, rhythmically, as though asleep. I don’t know if that works, or if Jonah’s just run out of things to say, but I can see the little black circles of his eyes melt into crescents as his blinks become longer…and longer.

Carried off to his crib, he doesn’t make a peep.

Finally, he sleeps.

Until 3:45, when he ralphs on my shoulder, and we start it all over again.