Steve Gilliard, 1964-2007

It is with tremendous sadness that we must convey the news that Steve Gilliard, editor and publisher of The News Blog, passed away June 2, 2007. He was 42.

To those who have come to trust The News Blog and its insightful, brash and unapologetic editorial tone, we have Steve to thank from the bottom of our hearts. Steve helped lead many discussions that mattered to all of us, and he tackled subjects and interest categories where others feared to tread.

Please keep Steve's friends and family in your thoughts and prayers.

Steve meant so much to us.

We will miss him terribly.

Theran: "Whose Bed Is It Anyway?"

Whose Bed Is It Anyway?
By Penelope Green

THIS is what 3 a.m. looks like at the Costello house, a diminutive red brick three-story in the West Village: On the second floor, Harrison, age 5, is splayed, sideways and snoring, across his parents’ king-size, Anglo-Indian four-poster, having muscled his mother out completely and pushed his father, Paul, a 35-year-old photographer, to the extreme edge of the bed. Sara Ruffin Costello, the style director of Domino magazine, is upstairs in her 3-year-old daughter Carolina’s bed, which is a hammered-metal four-poster queen dressed in pink paisley sheets with a ruffle. “It is the bed I would have if I were single,” Ms. Costello, 38, said. “It is my dream bed, which is a good thing because I spend a lot of time in it.” Harrison’s bed, his fourth, a trundle model from Ikea, is empty and pristine, the least-used space in the house.

“I used to get hysterical and wonder, what is this new life of stumbling around in the middle of the night?” Ms. Costello said. “Now it’s just so oddly part of the routine. Paul and I wonder, will we ever sleep together again?”

The Costellos are not alone in not being alone in their bed. But they are also not the happy hosts of the so-called family bed that’s been inching its way into the mainstream. “It is everybody’s Achilles’ heel, I think — this rotating, and not sleeping,” Ms. Costello said. “Yet it is so gross to think you’ve ended up with a family bed.” Like a lot of parents right now, Ms. Costello is a reluctant co-sleeper, too tired to disrupt a practice that may irritate one or both adults, but, in the end, seems to promise the “most amount of sleep for the most people in the house,” as Miriam K. Schneider, the mother of 11-year-old twin daughters, said.

. . .

“By the time I get into bed at night,” she said, “I’ve really had it. I can’t spend from 1 to 3 in the morning running back and forth, moving them back to their beds. I will tell you that my daughter does kick and spin. My husband will swear she pulls the chest hairs out of his chest. But if I don’t make an issue out of this, I do — we do — get a decent amount of sleep, at least six hours. The only thing that gives me a little bit of hope and comfort is the thought that I’m sure I won’t have teenagers sleeping in my bed.”

Labels: parents