Almost since birth, my daughter has been treating sleep like it’s a form of punishment. When she was an infant, I would often lie on the floor with my hand through the crib bars, touching her until she drifted off. When she finally did, I’d slowly crawl from the room, avoiding the squeaky floorboards (which I’d marked with masking tape, as if they were landmines).

She was never a child who fell asleep watching TV or while eating her dinner. (She views eating as a form of punishment, too, but so do many who have sampled my cooking.) Not once has Celeste announced, “I’m tired,” then headed to bed.

She doesn’t get crabby or unpleasant when she gets tired. She’s just as nice at midnight as noon. But I know she needs sleep, in spite of her passionate contention that she doesn’t.

“But I’m not even a little bit tired,” says Celeste.

“Maybe you’re not, but I am.”

“Don’t worry,” she says with a reassuring pat to my hand. “If I need something, I’ll wake you.”

In her eight and a half years, Celeste has become the master of bedtime postponement. Although she started with the typical and unimaginative glass of water request, she quickly expanded her repertoire to include pleas of hunger, painstakingly thorough dental hygiene, hair brushing, hair braiding, “forgotten” homework assignments, and plot points to her next screenplay that she just has to write down before she forgets them. (That’s another column.)

This girl of mine is one wily creature, and every time I manage to successfully sidestep or derail one of her bedtime maneuvers, I feel crafty and pleased with myself.

But Celeste finally found my weak spot. The hole in my armor. The loophole so large she can crawl through and dance.

She learned I can’t bring myself to shut off her light so long as she’s reading.

Part of our bedtime ritual used to include me reading to her. Later, it became her reading one page, then me reading the next, and eventually, it became her reading to me. Lately, though, it’s become her reading alone. And so long as she does, she knows that light can stay on, no matter how late. It’s the loophole I grew up with myself, and my husband as well.

The last few days, though, it isn’t a book she’s taken to bed, but a big dry erase board. She covers the board with multiplication problems that she makes up herself, then carefully answers each one.

“What’s that one with the star beside it?” Geoff asked as he was checking her answers.

“That’s the bonus problem,” said Celeste.

“And if you answer it right. . .?”

“I give myself ten extra points.”

Her recent interest in math makes me happy as I’m sort of math-phobic and have been afraid she’d inherit my fear. Luckily, it’s been Geoff’s enthusiasm for math she’s picked up on, and like him, she thinks math is fun.

The one equation she can’t fathom, however, is the number of hours of sleep she needs in order to function.

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