So, we've been having trouble, all of a sudden, getting son (son!) to go to sleep at night. It seems (seems!) to be related to the beginning of preschool. He goes three days a week, but for the past two weeks or so, he's spent every night absolutely refusing to go to sleep in his own bed. He's also become alarmingly clingy and generally tearful in the hour or so between the end of dinner and the bedtime story.

There was a time - I can remember it well - when bedtime for him involved giving him a sippy cup of milk, turning on the miraculous Fisher Price Aquarium music and saying "Good night." He'd just crawl into bed and lie there. If he wasn't tired, he'd play with cars in bed until he got tired. But now, something has happened. He insists on sleeping in *our* bed. He'll even wake up in the middle of the night and holler until he's allowed to crawl in.

I'm sure Brad Pitt knows the feeling, except he can afford to have a 9-foot-wide custom bed made, while your humble typist is dreaming up some kind of scheme involving plywood, cinder blocks and leftover mattresses from Goodwill. Oh, and we'd probably need to set up some kind of tent in the yard to get a room large enough to assemble it.

We're suspecting it's an attachment thing to do with missing mama during the days he's in school. (Although I haven't ruled out nightmares brought on by slipping into the TV room while Mama and older siblings are watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs. Mainly because I'm jealous - they always watch 'em when I'm out of the house.)

I've been telling son (son!) lately - in the middle of the night, before he literally kicks me out of the bed and I trudge off, bruised and baffled, to sleep on the couch - that he's got it easier than he knows.

Perhaps tonight I'll read him the story of 10-year-old Huang Li, a girl making sports history by swimming the Xiang river with her hands and feet tied, covering two miles in three hours. She's training for crossing the English Channel (presumably without her limbs tied).

"She asks me every day, 'Can I achieve this? Is the English Channel wide? Are the waves really big?'," said Huang's father, Huang Daosheng, a teacher who is also her swimming coach. "Next time, she will swim further and I will follow her in a boat to ensure safety."

I offer no comment on parental priorities.

I will say, however, the coming Olympics is making people get some strange ideas. Some are dangerous and cruel, but some are pretty swell. Take Yao Ming. He's gotten in a spot of trouble for being a Special Olympics hero. Because he wanted to appear at the Special Olympics opening ceremonies, he spent too much time in Beijing and missed the first couple days of NBA training. So his team fined him. If you're going to get in trouble over anything, you know, this is the thing to get in trouble over. Found via Shanghai Scrap, a blog with its priorities in the right order.