"If you take coffee every day it doesn't work as well." She munches pancake.

"Oh. Fair enough, I suppose."

"Mm-hm. Besides, I never really got used to the taste and don't need all the cream and sugar."

"I can take it or leave it. Sleep has never really given me trouble, I do need it but as long as I get a reasonable amount of it more-or-less daily I can function well during the day."

"Same here."

"Gosh, I wonder what getting enough sleep is like, I will probably never know."

"Don't you get enough sleep with Isabella at school? The room for yourself?"

"It helps but the house'll settle or somebody'll be up using the bathroom or it'll be windy or a dog'll bark or the air conditioning'll come on or something."

"...the house'll settle? You ever think of getting noise-cancelling headphones or something?"

"I wear earplugs, they just don't help that much. You figure out how to sleep with headphones on and I will be eternally grateful except not in a way requiring me to do anything."

"Do you also toss and turn a lot? I'm pretty immobile when I sleep."

"...No idea. Dunno."

"Ma'am?" he asks Isabella.

"I wake him up, not the other way around. It is possible I have never seen Alex actually asleep when he wasn't really sick, which might affect things."

"Huh. I suppose you could, like, put a camera somewhere and record yourself sleeping?" he asks Alex.

"...the point of finding out if I toss and turn would be...?"

"Finding out if you can sleep with headphones on?"

"Headphones aren't really comfy even if you don't roll over."

"Hm. I suppose."

Shrug. "I get by."

"Yeah. I wonder if that's something a psion could fix."

"Well, I could deafen him at bedtime and fix it in the morning, but it'd be pretty useless as a skill otherwise. Not sure what other angle I'd take."

"Magic is pretty opaque to me, but this doesn't particularly sound much different than somehow figuring out what counts as nightmares and then making me not have them."

"Sure. But I wouldn't be able to do anything else with the skill without advertising to light sleepers that they totally want this service."

"Hmm, yeah," he sighs.