Guest Dad Joe Burris writes about his young daughter's sleep study experience for Father's Day Friday:

Last Saturday I took my 4-year-old daughter Onalenna to a sleep disorder clinic. I had been planning to do so for a while, but reticence always crept in at the last minute. Having done a sleep study myself, I knew how uncomfortable they can be.

But after four years of her ebb-and-flow sleep patterns -- where ebb usually beats out flow by a long shot -- I decided I had to seek a specialist.

The interesting thing about sleep studies is that they start out wonderfully. You enter this spacious, elegant room that has all the trappings of a Ritz Carlton. Onalenna’s room even came with a Sleep Number bed. From the moment you enter it, everything about the room says comfort.

It usually goes downhill from there.

An attendant then enters the room with a load of contraptions and a bundle of wires, the latter of which are to be attached to you at one end.

A sticky substance is applied to your body and then the end tip of a wire is placed atop the sticky stuff and tape is placed above the wire. It’s sort of like turning you into a string puppet.

Now, I tried to warn Onalenna about this. I told her that they would attach wires to her legs, her chest, her neck and forehead. I also mentioned that they would place a monitor over her heart.

But I forgot about the wires they put on her cheeks and the back of her head.

When they were finished with my 4-year-old daughter, she had more wiring than a circuit breaker.

And then there were the tubes that they inserted in her nose.

It’s not surprising that she complained she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. But within 20 minutes she was snoring away – due in part to an earlier soccer practice that tired her out.

For much of the night, Onalenna kept yanking the tubes out of her nose – mostly without waking up. The attendant would come in and re-insert it every time. At one point I asked the attendant if there was a better way to keep the tubes in.

He said that they’re accustomed to having to re-insert them during the night and added, “Last week we had to revisit a patient 30 times during the night because he kept taking his out.”

Fortunately, my daughter wasn’t that uncomfortable, and sometime after midnight she actually slept without bothering the wires.

The next morning the attendant returned and removed them. They gave her one wire for her school’s show and tell.

I thought my Little One handled it like a trooper, and I told her I was very proud of her. Still, when the post-sleep-study questionnaire asked me what could be done to improve the procedure, my answer came easily.

“Make it wireless.”