"They're playing together awfully nicely this morning," my wife mumbled to me at about 8:30 this morning.

"Yeah," I mumbled back.

"So, am I being lazy by sleeping or am I being a good parent by letting my kids play nicely together?" she asked. As you might have guessed, my wife is a firm believer in the royal "I."

"Good parent," I said. And I rolled over.

Just for the record, my wife and I have sons who are about to turn seven and four. Any use of the word "sleep" is not a euphemism (not that there would be anything wrong with that, of course).

Every weekday morning the family arises at 7:30 and by 8:15 has gotten dressed, eaten breakfast, made lunches and (in the case of my wife) taken a shower. At 8:15, we leave the house. We all walk the three blocks to Barb's bus stop, and then the boys and I walk the mile-and-a-quarter (or so) to Max's school. By necessity, weekday mornings at our house are models of military precision.

Weekend mornings, on the other hand, are anything but. Sam usually gets up between seven and eight. Max is usually somewhat later, though it's hard to tell these days as he'll often sit in bed and read for an hour or two. Barb and I like to sleep until nine or so. Barb tends to refer to this as being lazy. I tend to refer to this as recharging our batteries (decidedly NOT a pun). It's really nice that Max and Sam can play by themselves for an hour or two--and, for that matter, that Max can make a rudimentary breakfast for the two of them.

This relative peace on weekend mornings is something new, though I couldn't tell you when it started to happen on a regular basis. By and large, the developmental milestones of older children are more evolutionary than revolutionary. I remember there was a time when Max and Sam would automatically get into constant yelling matches when unsupervised, but I couldn't give you a date when that changed. It's been a while.

Back in the day, one of us would get up while the other would "sleep." Of course, parental supervision (especially tired parental supervision) didn't do much to stop the hollering. So this "sleep" (you can tell this use is euphemistic because of the quotation marks) involved about a few minutes of light sleep and an hour or two of wondering when the banshees would calm down. Not exactly great rest, but parents of young children always take what they can get.

The "Do you want to get up, or should I?" moment always led to resentment. It's not fair, of course, and we weren't smart enough to set up a schedule. In fact, we actively avoided any semblance of a schedule because secretly each of us hoped the other would take pity on a sleepy spouse and do the right thing.

Do not try this at home.

But now there are no worries. We can both sleep (in the original non-euphemistic sense) without recriminations. There's still the ugly specter of "lazy" hanging over our heads, of course. But Barb's definition of "not lazy" is fairly strict. Mother Theresa? Lazy. The guys working double shifts at the Spam factory in Austin, Minn.? Lazy. John McCain doing rallies in seven states on the day before the election? Lazy. So I think I can live with "lazy" and know that by my absence, I'm contributing to brotherly love.

Until, of course, the banshees decide to come out and play.

Jon Worley is a big fan of sleep.