The thing about two young kids is that everything is multiplied. When the kids are happy and getting along, life is unimaginably good. When the converse is true, hell would seem like a pleasant weekend get-away.

Of course, the good moments are hard to really enjoy because they inevitably occur after an almost sleepless (for the parents) night. But the same is also true of the truly dreadful times.

I've never regretted my decision to have kids, but it does strengthen my response to people who are ambivalent: Don't!

Babies are cute, but they're also demanding and often bafflingly intransigent. I know parents who claim to recognize a "tired cry" and a "hungry cry" and a "don't leave me cry" in their two-week-old infants, and all I can say is that they must be psychic. Even now, our son Sam (who turned one last week) can be decidedly inconsistent when it comes to his method of whining. Hungry and tired, in particular, tend to be some combination of thumb-sucking and yelping--but it's often hard to tell which. Or maybe he's just hungry and tired all the time. I've long gone past the point where I have the energy to worry about it.

It has been fun to watch Max grow into his role as an older brother. He's always loved babies, and he's loved Sam from the moment he saw him. Sam, for his part, simply adores Max. He will crawl forever in the direction of Max's voice. Which is now producing some of the first real sibling tension. Max is a boy who likes to be alone as often as not. Sam, like any baby, doesn't have any real notion of personal space. His favorite move is to rise up on his knees and then dive at his target. It's cute, but it can hurt, too.

My challenge has been to moderate such sessions and also give each boy the one-on-one attention they need. In a sense, that's impossible--there is no way to give that much attention--but I think we do okay. Max is a well-adjusted, generally happy kid. At least, that's what his pre-school teachers say. And Sam seems to be reasonably happy as well. He laughs a lot, in any case.

Me? I'm much older this December than I was last December. My normal night's sleep has been six hours, but three or four isn't that unusual. Sam has been sicker than Max was (colds, etc.), and so I've spent a number of nights up (including one about a week ago). That's all normal, of course, but it doesn't make me any less tired.

Barbara is even more exhausted than me. She's been on the road as often as not since going back to work, and that hasn't eased her stress or sleep depravation. We're lucky if each of us can catch an hour or two of extra sleep on the weekends--most often, we can't. Which doesn't improve our moods. Which makes rolling with the punches--not to mention preparing for a move--that much more difficult.

Again, though, I don't regret having a second child--Sam is most often a delight, smiling, laughing and chirping his way through life. It's a lot of responsibility, of course, and young kids need more supervision than older ones. I remember thinking that we'd just about had it made with Max when he was 2 1/2--this a few months before Sam was born. "Life is just about perfect right now. What the hell are we doing?" I thought.

Well, we were ushering in a new child. A child that has enhanced all our lives even more than we could have imagined a year ago. Even if right at this moment, I am barely able to remember a specific incident during the past year.

Which is why I tell anyone who mentions that they have decided to not have kids that I understand completely. In fact, there's a part of me that still misses life without kids. Though, once again, it's been so long I have no real recollection of what that life really was. And every time Sam falls over and whacks me in the face, my old life recedes that much further into the past.

Jon Worley has noticed that the length of his columns is proportional to the amount of sleep he's gotten in the past week.