Featured blogger Beth McNichol appears every Tuesday. 

The thing is, kids don't know. They. Just. Don't. Know. If they knew, they would leave no chicken nugget unturned; they would clean their plates now and enjoy it, before they have to get their cholesterol tested annually later. They would listen to their mothers. But most importantly, they would sleep. They would sleep like there's no tomorrow, in copious, unmedicated and unending quantities.

This was all I could think when I woke one morning last week, bleary-eyed and dangerously devoid of coffee, to the 24th day of "Toddler Watch: An Unnerving Story of One Little Girl's Battle with Sleep, and the Parents She Drove Completely Crazy." (Adapted from the screenplay, "Caged Parents, Free Children: The Aftermath of Midnight Fingerpainting."

Randy came and sat on my side of the bed after he'd gotten dressed. I blinked through the gravel in my eyes, looked up at him bitterly and cracked the crusted drool on my face to deliver my best fake smile. "Why," I grumbled at him, "did we have children?"

"It was a rough one last night, wasn't it?" he replied, avoiding the question.

Rough is what you use to describe sandpaper, the perpetual stubble on my husband's face or a particularly choppy boat ride. Rough is the misfortune of having "Dancing with the Stars" bumped off your DVR by the seventh-straight airing of a British car show your roommate watches. (Ahem.) But what we have been experiencing practically every night since Easter is not rough. This is parental brutality, inflicted by the hands, feet, voice box and tear ducts of a 3-year-old.

I remember when my niece, who is now 12, was small and tantrum-y; I remember thinking that all tantrums can't be like this, with the squealing and the flailing and whatnot. It turns out, they're not. They're worse. At least in my house, where they happen at the same intervals each night: dinner time, bed time, and 4 a.m. I'll give you dinner time, with the whole "Curious George! Oh noooo! Mommy! What happened to Curious George?! My TV's gone!" bit; and bedtime, with the whole, "Daddy! Daddy! I need fresh water! I need another book! I need [insert name of today's plaything obsession here]!" Needs, albeit tenuous, are associated with these tantrums -- as is, apparently, the end of the world as we know it.

But at 4 a.m., the only needs worthy of interrupting my sleep are "The house is on fire," and "There is a giant, child-eating dinosaur on my bed." I have yet to see either of these things happen, so I can't figure out why MJ wakes up, finds her way to the floor of her room and begins beating the holy crap out of her door with her feet, screaming hysterically all the while. If you go in and ask her what the problem is, she will tell you through tears the size of Barney that she is "done sleeping." Done sleeping. Oh honey, a day will come when you draw a blank stare at that phrase, it shall be so long since you said it last. A day will come when, upon asked what you do for fun, now that you have children, "sleep," will be the only response you can muster. You will be too tired to remember the last time you had fun that did not involve snoring. Too tired to remember the last time you got to be the one who decided that you were "done sleeping."

If only they knew.

To read more about Beth, go to MotherBunker.