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By Hillary Ibarra

Have you ever contemplated building a safe room in your house? A place to hide from the kids until help arrives?

With the continual tattling, Wild West savagery and whining apocalypse in my home this summer, I seriously thought about it. But my husband said that if such a room existed, he would have no qualms in beating me to it and locking me out. It wasn't a lack of gallantry, he asserted. Certain situations demand every man for himself.

Sigh. Raising good human beings is challenging.

Maybe impossible.

Children can lie boldly by age two with no formal training. They covet their neighbor's toy, then rip it from their hands and claim they had it first. They smack or pinch a sibling just to entertain themselves, then say it was an accident. They splatter sticky substances over your walls, furniture and floor every five minutes daily, and then pretend not to see the mess.

They also flout your best efforts to keep them safe, scaling slippery surfaces and climbing towering pieces of furniture in order to reach a pair of scissors or that grill lighter you put out of their way. When bored, they'll play dodge ball with bricks and pick-up sticks with knives!

(Okay, I exaggerate. My boys played dodge ball with whiffle balls, and they still hurt each other.)

Our most even-tempered child, Ana, was not exempt from challenges. When she was three years old, she came up to me after peering at her baby sis in the crib, her brown eyes wide and innocent, and asked solemnly, "Mama, if I hit the baby like this, that wouldn't be good, would it?"

"No, no, it wouldn't," I assured her, shocked. "We never want to hurt the baby. We have to be gentle."

She nodded her head sagely, but then came back not long after and asked, "If I threw this at the baby..."

"No!" I reiterated.

The most challenging thing about raising kids isn't the jealousy, brutality or fibbing, though. It's that they make a hard job radically more difficult by robbing their parents of that most basic necessity of life and brain function: sleep.

Now, don't get me wrong. We love the little buggers. It would be nice to remember why, but our brains can only retain information for an average of two minutes when sleep deprived. Sometimes less.

If you are not a parent or you're a new one, you may well believe that your sleep will someday be normal again after having kids, and I must say....oh, excuse me....haha...cabn't tyupe weel for laugfhingy...

Where was I? Ah, yes. Normal sleep. Nevermore, quoth the Raven. Nevermore!

There will be restless nights spent nursing sick children, providing lukewarm baths, medicine and cups of water at ungodly hours, and then washing vomit and less pleasant fluids from clothes and sheets. There will be midnight revelations of, "Mama? Papa? I wet the bed again" or "I had a bad dream..." You'll sleep in recliners, blood pooling in your legs, your weary arms encircling a child or two. And 7 a.m. from now on will qualify as a luxurious, miraculous sleep-in.

Worse, your dreams will be haunted for years by the dreaded midnight visitor. This little schemer sprawls in your bed half the night instead of creating havoc from his/her own room. Your poor husband will curl up in a fetal position on a single square foot of sheet for hours, sheltering his manhood from wild, unpredictable assault by little limbs while you have the hair repeatedly yanked out of your head by tiny merciless hands.

I've spent years trying to keep this nocturnal, parent-seeking creature out. I'm this far from throwing out the baby gate and bribery and instead attaching a rubber mallet on a spring to a steel door.

But all this talk about outrageous demands on your resources coupled with inadequate sleep isn't meant to discourage you.

No, I'm here to tell you that if you persevere through the thick fog of uncertainty, the dark clouds of frustration, and the deluge of angst and guilt from pint-sized tyrants on a mere four to five hours of sleep, you can — yes, you — raise fine, upstanding people. You may not know it until they enter school, but if you persist in teaching your little delinquents morals and civilized behavior between cat naps, one day you'll hear their teachers say, "I just love your child! She's so kind/helpful/respectful/sweet."

And on the drive back home with your cranky, fighting children you'll think to yourself, "We did it!" Then you'll promptly forget what you did.

After all, the drive took longer than two minutes, and you can't stop thinking about that safe room.

— Hillary Ibarra

Hillary Ibarra has had several humor pieces published on Aiming Low and the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop blog and was recently published at Hahas for Hoohas. She is a mother of four who dreams of playing the banjo, living in Jane Austen's childhood home and writing for more than spam artists and 50 loyal readers but can't seem to find them in the laundry. She is the mysterious blogger at No Pens, Pencils, Knives or Scissors. In her spare time she likes to threaten to sell her children to the zoo, and their little dog, too.