Saying I’m a heavy sleeper is like calling Mount Everest a large hill, Albert Einstein a clever fella, the female orgasm a nice feeling. A few years back, a gas leak in an apartment building around the corner lead to a massive explosion in the small hours of the night. The explosion levelled half the building. Six fire trucks and countless patrol cars sped to the scene, sirens screaming. A crowd gathered as the crackling blaze consumed the structure.

Or so I’ve been told. I slept through the whole thing.

So when my best friend Tanja dropped off her 15-month-old daughter last night, I felt some concerns. After more than a year of non-stop parenting, she and her boyfriend decided it was time to have an evening out together, and asked me to babysit little Anna for the night. I adore the child and she smiles at me a lot, so I wasn’t expecting any tantrums or crying fits. My brothers have 6 children between them, so the whole feeding and diaper changing routine is familiar to me. It was just that I was afraid I’d sleep through any nighttime crying or calling-out.

As it turns out, mothers are not the only people who wake up at the slightest sound from a small child.

At this point, it is also relevant to mention my heavy sleeping is accompanied by a corresponding reluctance to wake up. I tend to open my eyes only after 15 minutes in the shower; when I was still teaching programming classes, my morning wake-up was usually at 9:30, the time the classes started. Everything before that, from getting out of bed to showering, having breakfast, drinking my first cup-a-joe, went by in a semi-conscious haze. People who know me avoid talking to me in the mornings; there is just no point.

But when Anna woke up at 1:30am with a wet diaper and an appetite for hot milk, she said ‘momma’ twice, but I was wide awake at the first one, and at her side at the second. I guess there is a circuit in my auditory cortex that filters out explosions and sirens, but instantly jump-starts my brain at the sound of a dissatisfied child.

Now if I could only program that circuit to filter out noisy neighborhood hoods as well…