The Nighttime Rule

It was a stupid argument, really. He was mad that I was repeating things. I was mad that he wasn't responding. It was 2am and we had both gotten two hours of sleep. Our little man-cub was to blame. He had decided that he wouldn't sleep from 7pm- midnight and then he would wake up every two hours after that.

My husband and I had both gotten to the point where we were snapping at each other every time we heard our man-cub cry. And it was all due to lack of sleep. I was too tired to realize I would repeat things, and he was too tired to bother responding. We would have the same type of argument every night. So one morning (after we had both gotten enough sleep to be coherent) we set The Nighttime Rule: anything we said at night, we wouldn't take offense from and we didn't have to apologize for in the morning.

And it worked. We still snapped at each other at night, but we each knew that the other person didn't really mean it--it was the sleep deprivation talking. So instead of having a round of apologies in the morning for saying things we didn't remember saying, instead we just focused on the fact that we survived the night, and we still loved each other.