jaimalaya: I think this post proves that sleep is important, CHILDREN

Well, I was going to write oodles of paragraphs spouting the virtues of the ginormous consignment sale that I go to twice a year to stock up on clothes for the kids for the coming season. I was going to.

That was before we somehow had the mother of all sleepless nights.

THE MOTHER OF ALL.

(Apparently I like repeating myself. Or maybe I’m just tired.)

I was out until a little after 10, and came home starving so was forced to eat a bowl of ‘Bee Cereal’ as Sebastian calls it. I don’t really know why I’m telling you that, other than I like to be detail oriented.

(Side note – in my 7^th grade writing class I was told to add detail to my writing. Being a literal person, I discussed the myriad of dents in my parents’ white car – with red interior – that I was riding in when I found out the truth about old St. Nick. My teacher was not impressed. She also wasn’t impressed when I wrote a story from the perspective of a dead turkey who got eaten for Thanksgiving. Something about Jesus or dead things talking or something. Way to impart your own beliefs on me and stifle my creativity, MRS. PIKE. To this day I haven’t written another story detailing what a turkey is thinking after being eaten on Thanksgiving. The world is just a little bit worse off because of it.)

I stayed up to help Chris with some writing work he was doing, but mainly I was just trying to find out how to care for the new bamboo cloth diapers I’d found. Also, twitter.

I finally went to bed around 12 and convinced him that it was a good idea to give up what he was doing around 12:30 – mostly because I couldn’t sleep with the glare of the computer shining on my eyelids. I think I was still wound up from all the deals I found (Snow suits for everyone under the age of 4!) that I couldn’t shut my mind down. And staring at the clock helped tremendously let me tell you.

At some point I fell asleep, because at 4:30 I heard Sebastian woke me up by rolling around and kicking and driving the car we let him take to bed ON THE WALL. Honestly, I don’t really know what he was doing to make that kind of racket.

And guess who he woke up? Yep – Adele, who I’ve been trying to wean from using nursing as a pacifier in the middle of the night, woke up mad. I went upstairs to lay her down, give her a pacifier and pat her cheek to see if that would suffice, then walked next door to Sebastian’s room to tell him to LAY DOWN AND GO TO SLEEP IT IS TOO EARLY TO BE WAKING ME UP YOU HEATHEN CHILD. Of course, this was said through the screams of my youngest so maybe it didn’t have the calming effect I wanted it to.

And then I went back downstairs to lay down and listen to the chorus of a screaming child plus a roller derby on the monitors.

After about 30 minutes of that I went back upstairs to nurse Adele and Chris went to lay down with Sebastian. Adele, fortunately calmed down and went to sleep but as soon as Chris left Sebastian’s room the little demon boy revved up his engines again.

At this point I was PISSED. Turning off the monitor didn’t help. Putting a pillow over my head didn’t help. And so I went back upstairs to rip the little cars from my son’s hand and possibly tie him down to stop him from kicking the walls or throwing a rave or whatever it was that was going on upstairs.

That resulted in him crying, of course. (I swear I was actually nice to him and calmly told him that it would probably be a good idea to lay down and close his eyes, but still there was crying.) To prevent him from waking up his sister again I laid down with him, which was nice because after scooting down and flipping around and tossing and turning he snuggled up to me. And I thought I’d won. I walked out when it looked like his eyes were shutting and he was winding down.

And as soon as my head hit the pillow I heard the thumps and bumps and scrapes that I’d been hearing for the past TWO HOURS.

I doubled up on pillows over my head closed my eyes. I think I fell asleep about 5 minutes before Chris’ alarm went off.

Chris said I should try to take a nap now, while Adele is in her bed (not napping, of course). But I think I’d probably feel worse. So I’m loading up on coffee and about to go take a bunch of tags off some brand new (to me) winter clothes for the kids.

I also bought a bat and a pirate Halloween costume for Sebastian because I didn’t know which one he’d prefer. Adele’s going to be a flower because that was the only costume I could find in her size that didn’t come with daddy issues.