It's 4:45 a.m. Most days, this would be an optimal "Salary Mom" time to be out of bed. My commute and my grooming benefit anytime I'm up before five in the morning.

This morning, however, I wish I were unconscious. I have been drifting in and out of post-operative sleep for the last 12 hours.

I am recovering from outpatient surgery, which means I'm too doped up to do much of anything and not quite comfortable enough to sleep.

At least my middle child is sleeping. That's an improvement over the other night.

Ironically, I think my mother-in-law woke him up. The new neighbors were  hammering on their side of the townhouse wall around 10:30 p.m., and my mother-in-law decided to protest by banging at full volume with a broom on our side of the wall.

Our 11 year-old was awakened by all the racket and couldn't get back to sleep. Once we fell asleep, he got up, turned on the light, closed the door, and played with Legos until his father discovered him the next morning.

He spent the following day lurching between giddy, surly and sleepy. The bugs and the asthma attack at evening swim practice did not improve matters.

Setting and sticking to a sleep schedule is boring stuff. But one thing I learned from teaching my kids to sleep at night is this: letting the kid get up and play when he can't sleep at night is recipe for no one sleeping, ever. It's worth being boring to get decent sleep.

Just talking to the neighbors instead of banging on the wall can also seem like a boring option. I remember battling dormitory neighbors in college with prank calls and blaring punk music to “show them” after particularly loud nights.

In retrospect I'm not sure how that showed anyone anything. But it does shed some unexpected light on how I went through 12 roommates in three years.

More than noise, the biggest source of neighborly conflict in our Owen Brown townhouse community is parking. If someone takes my parking place and I recognize the car, I knock on the appropriate door and ask the owner to move. If I don't recognize the car, I usually block it in and assume that the owner will find me when he or she wants to go.

I'm direct about it. What I don't do is write an anonymous note about the parking rules or the inconvenience of having my parking place occupied. I'm not trying to make a point, I just want my parking place back.

There's something satisfying about banging on walls and blasting music—or secretly pulling an all-nighter. But the satisfaction doesn't wind up having much to do with solving your initial problem, and it doesn't last long.

I don't have much hope of changing my mother-in-law's style of, uh, communication. But I hope my tween remembers how lousy he felt longer than he remembers the adrenaline rush he got duping his parents.