Finally, crying at home again

For two weeks and change, crying was not acceptable.  Crying was to be extinguished at almost all cost, including--almost nightly--at the cost of precious hours of sleep.  Whether we were in Hameln, where a sock-footed dash down wooden steps to the babies' room was in fact life-threateningly slippery, or in Wuppertal, where our floor-camping children (we have pea pods, or baby tents, for them) could wail within a few feet of our own bed, we reacted with uncharacteristically soft-hearted immediacy to every little whimper and cry that Sylvia and Rafael emitted.  We simply did not want to awaken our kind and generous hosts. And once we were staying in hotels rather than homes, we were likewise concerned about our neighbors.

Mind you, we never had an explicit conversation about this beforehand, but our typical approach of letting the kiddos cry themselves to sleep when necessary was abandoned about the time the wheels came up on the 767 that carried us across the pond.  Consequently, we only slept uninterruptedly through the night a couple of times during our vacation that took us to Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey.  By day, we experienced, bleary-eyed, all the family, sites, food, hiking, autobahn, cycling, boats, mosques, castles, and museums that we could handle.  I think that we remember most of it, and even enjoyed it, too.

But the nights were long, sob-filled, and draining.  And that was before the kids woke up.  Then the crying and hugging, and pacing, and shhooshhh-ing began.  We could always get them back down again, though it often took 15, 30 or 60 minutes, not to mention the stirring of the blood and the heightening of the senses that lead to a long trip back to sleep again.

So, you can imagine my delight as last night, for the first time in weeks, I listened, cold-hearted, to wails and watched impassively the four streams of tears.  The crying has returned, and with it, deep and joyful sleep will ensue.  For they rarely cry beyond what our hearts can bear, and in the end--now in the comfort and solitude of our dear home--both they and we shall return to our routines of sleeping, eating, playing, and yes, a bit of crying, that had hitherto provided us with such joy.