David Trinko: Daughter uncovers secret night of ice cream and ...

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Bedtime is hard enough without your kids thinking you're partying downstairs.

Anyone with kids knows one of your biggest struggles comes when the sun goes down. By their nature, children don't want to admit they've used up their allotment of energy for the day. They'll keep on playing and living life for as long as you'll let them.

Generally, that's a good thing. Who wouldn't like to recapture some of that childlike wonder and zest for life in their adulthood?

It's really difficult, though, if you're trying to get your children to fall asleep so you can work on something else.

Murphy's Law guarantees your kids won't feel like drifting off to a restful sleep on the same night you have work to do after they're out for the count.

Kids don't really understand what types of things keep us awake after they're sleeping. They seem to think a disco ball must fall from the ceiling when their eyes close. Maybe there's some cool dance music going. Of course, there must be really, really good snacks that put whatever they ate that day to shame.

They don't want to sleep because they don't want to miss anything.

To be clear, my children had absolutely no reason to believe great parties break out after they fall asleep. Most of the time, my wife and I are out a few minutes after the last of our children falls asleep.

I do need to use the word “had” instead of “have” in that previous paragraph, thanks to a big mistake on our part Thursday.

Thursday was my wife's birthday. (She's 29 and holding.) It was also the night before she needed to make a presentation to a group of visitors at her workplace, and her PowerPoint presentation wasn't quite ready. I agreed to help her with some of the setup of the presentation.

We finally and mercifully got the last of the children to bed around 9:30 p.m., or so we thought. Uninterrupted, my wife continued researching and jotting down notes, and I began setting up a template for her presentation.

Before we got too far, we agreed we could both use a nighttime sugar boost, so I made ice cream cones for us.

Perhaps ice cream at night has the same wafting aromas as coffee or bacon in the morning. I doubt we'd had more than four or five licks off those ice cream cones before our youngest daughter, 3, returned downstairs to see what we were doing.

That's when she caught us, eating ice cream after we told her we wouldn't be doing anything interesting after she fell asleep. She took the remainder of my wife's ice cream cone into custody.

I sense a little more suspicion in her in the days since. She seems to wonder what kind of fun we're having when she's not around. Everything's a cover-up to her, as she considers every conspiracy of fun that's possible. That one exception makes her think she's missing something wonderful.

Now it's up to us to regain her trust and prove we're just as boring after dark as she once thought we were.

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