Worry. This is a catch-all word for emotions that can range from mild to heart-pounding, depending on whether your child is merely testing her skills on the playground or pulling out of your hand to run toward traffic.

I’m what an earlier generation liked to call a “worrywart.” I worry about almost everything, but usually succeed in communicating none of that worry to my child. I encourage her to try new things, while taking appropriate care against hazards of course.

Probably most parents are worrywarts to some extent, which is why marketers are so effective at getting us to spend a fortune baby-proofing our homes and buying safety devices.

In my in-box today was a promo for a product called the Snuza. It’s a baby monitor that clips to your infant’s diaper and monitors movement. If the device doesn’t sense a movement in 15 seconds, it stimulates the baby with a “pulsed vibration.” If no movement is sensed after another 5 seconds, an alarm goes off. On the Web site’s frequently-asked-questions page, the maker acknowledges this is not a medical device but is more akin to the heart monitors people wear while they exercise.

As I read all this over, I found myself getting angry at this company for exploiting parents’ fear of sudden infant death syndrome to sell a lifestyle gadget.

You see, my daughter, as readers of this blog know, was a preemie. When she was in the hospital for more than two months, she was hooked up to an actual medical monitor. Learning to interpret the sounds it made took a while. At first, I was worried every time it went off, but the nurses assured me that those weren’t the beeps to be concerned about. Then, one day, I was holding her when it went off with a new sound. Assuming it was one of those unimportant beeps, I ignored it. That was until a nurse quickly came up and started vigorously rubbing my baby’s back to remind her to breath. That wasn’t the only time I had that experience. I, too, learned to rub her back when the monitor went off a certain way.

Then, one day, it was time to take her home, to take her off the monitor where I could watch how fast her heart was beating, how many breaths she took a minute and how much oxygen was in her blood.

It was leap of faith. Faith in the doctors that they wouldn’t send her home before she was ready. Faith that she would be OK. And faith that I would at last get to be her mom in our own home.

I buried my worries and embraced a normal family life. If my daughter had needed a monitor, then the doctors would have sent her home with one. (As, indeed, they did for some preemies.)

What if I had given in to my darker fears and bought a contraption like the Snuza? It’s not a medical device, as the maker clearly states. If your child needed a monitor, wouldn’t you want a medical device that could actually save her life? So who is it for? The parents. To feed their worry. The Web site proclaims: “How did we cope before Snuza? It’s been a great relief to finally get a good night’s sleep.”

What kind of goodnight ritual is it when you attach a monitor to your baby’s diaper? Isn’t that saying, in effect, I don’t trust you to live until morning without this thing? Every new parent has this fear, and every new parent gets over it — except those who are reminded of it daily when they buy products like the Snuza, that is.

I am not minimizing the risk of SIDS. I can easily imagine the agony. But the American SIDS Institute does NOT list devices like the Snuza in its advice for parents, which includes placing infants on their backs to sleep without any soft coverings that can suffocate. New research also shows that having a fan in the room can also lesson the risk of SIDS.

What do you think about devices like the Snuza? More harm than help or a useful addition to the nursery?

When my son was just a few months old, our pediatrician promised he’d be sleeping through the night by the time he was 6-months old.

Okay maybe she didn’t promise. But we should have had her define ‘through the night’. His version is nothing like what we were led to believe.

Now 13 months, he goes to bed between 6 and 7 pm, depending on how many times he interrupts his bottle or book reading to march back and forth across his room waving a piece of paper, or a block, or his teddy bear or whatever else is at hand. 

When he finally has enough milk, one of four things happens: the bottle is finished and he has fallen asleep and we put him in the crib; the bottle is finished, he pushes it away and goes off on another marchfest; the bottle isn’t finished but he’s asleep and we put him in the crib; the bottle isn’t finished, he pushes it away and goes off on another marchfest. 

Options 1 and 3, we love. Options 2 and 4 usually extend bedtime by 30 to 45 minutes. But its OK. He’s adorable and usually in good spirits at this point. 

He routinely wakes up after that sometime between 10 and midnight. 

There is nothing cuter than the half-asleep pose he assumes sitting there in a corner of his crib. There is nothing more frustrating than not knowing what it is he wants since he’s not talking to us yet (I mean, he’s talking but we have no idea what he’s saying). Sometimes, it takes another bottle, sometimes a diaper change, sometimes a walk around the apartment in the stroller. 

I’ve heard people put their young kids into the car and drive around the block a few times. I live in Manhattan. I’ll do anything for my son short of give up a parking spot.

Getting back to ‘through the night’, the hardest part is when he wakes up for good, usually between 4 and 5 in the morning. Through the night should mean ‘until it’s light out’ or at least when I can raise the blinds and show him something other than the bread and newspaper trucks.

When I’m really, really, really tired I put on a DVD of one of the original Sesame Street episodes, stick him in the Pack n’ Play and slink off back to bed. He usually cries for a few minutes but then gets that deer in headlights look when he’s mesmerized by a television show. 

One morning the reprieve lasted just 24 minutes. When I went to the living room to see what had happened, I realized I had put on Jack’s Big Music Show instead of Sesame Street. Lesson of that day was to always make sure to set him up with an hour-long show.

Some days it’s easy. Other days, well …

I’m off to buy Baby Anbesol. Teething is hard work! It has gotten the better of Pumpkin—and of her parents, who were up until 5 a.m today with a cranky, inconsolable baby. It has been a surprise to us how much this latest round of teeth is killing her. Her incisors were a breeze and her molars were just a blip, but her canine teeth are coming with a bite. (I suppose it makes sense. Imagine bone shoving up through your gums. Ouch!)

As a result, Pumpkin can barely eat and has rejected even favorite foods. She started to bite down on a banana last night and pulled back with a whimper. I’ll admit it: She had leftover Easter cake for dinner. (I know, I know!) What’s worse, my husband gave her cake again for breakfast today while I was catching up on some sleep. (He knows! He knows!)

We’re ready to try new remedies. When earlier teething gave her an ache, I dosed Pumpkin with Tylenol, but it’s no match for this new pain. I’m going to try the Anbesol tonight. We shall see.

Good luck to us! And if you have any teething tips, pass them along!

Another nugget to get your parental juices flowing: A study by the National Sleep Foundation recommends that preschoolers get 11 to 13 hours of sleep each night. Children who are 5 to 12 should sleep 10 to 11 hours. Teens should sleep nine hours.

Someone sign me up to be a preschooler, please. I could stand to get 11 to 13 hours a night – and it doesn’t have to be sleep. I’d love to use most of that time to read quietly.

But in truth, do most children get that much sleep? Mine certainly don’t. My 8-year-old needs to get up at 7:30 a.m. for school. That means he should be in bed sometime between 6:30 and 8:30 p.m. each night. Ha ha ha. After I pick him up from the after-school center, we don’t walk in the door until 6:30 p.m. And then there’s homework, dinner, reading and bathtime before bed. And all that’s certainly not done by 8:30 p.m. It’s a stretch to get him in bed by 9:30 p.m. And, he’s a night owl, so even if he’s in bed, he doesn’t really go to sleep until 10 p.m. Or later.

My 13-year-old’s bus comes at 6:40 a.m. each day. He gets up at 6 a.m. That means he should be in bed by 9 p.m. That might work if he didn’t play on the school’s basketball team and band and didn’t have any homework.

I would love for all four of us to be in bed every night by 10 p.m. But for many working parents (and especially those who have long commutes), it’s simply not possible to do all the second-shift activities at home AND get the kids to bed at the “right” hour.

How do you grapple with the end of the day? And are your kids getting enough sleep?

So I’m in the shower this morning rinsing my hair when I realize, “Hey, this isn’t right. My hair feels almost like it has a coating.” That’s when it hits me, duh, I used the body wash instead of the conditioner. (In my defense, both have white bottles.)

It was a serious instance of “mommy brain,” brought on by a two-hour break in my sleep last night when Pumpkin woke up crying with teething pain. Instead of paying attention to my shower, I was zoned out and vaguely daydreaming about, I must admit, last night’s “American Idol.”

The incident brought back memories of the first year of Pumpkin’s life when I was pumping milk and allowing myself no more than four hours of sleep at a time to keep up my supply. But back then — whether it was adrenaline or someone watching out for a mom of a small child — I don’t remember making the same kind of silly mistakes. I think my body just got used to operating on less sleep. Now that I’ve been sleeping through the night, my brain is rebelling against a return to interruption. I had a Diet Coke for caffeine as soon as I got to the office today, so I think I’m back to normal. We’ll see.

Ok. So, here’s the situation: My girlfriend’s son does not sleep. He is nearly 3, and cries endlessly before bed. He screams for his mom if ignored, and demands whatever there is to demand. She is an awesome mom, and has done everything she can think of. She has nurtured him, indulged him, spoken sternly to him, set up a bedtime routine and stuck to it religiously. She has done the typically prescribed thing: Ignore him and let him go to sleep on his own – eventually. I guess that theory is he’ll eventually learn he has to do this. It has not worked despite repeated attempts. He is a happy kid when awake, and the most lovable child you’d ever want to be around. There’s just this sleep thing, and he has never been a good sleeper as it is.

So, what would you do? Suggestions? Similar experiences? Expert input? What’s up with the kid?