Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Washed Out

Have I mentioned that we're trying to get Alex out of pull-ups at night? We decided to take the same tack we'd taken for his daytime training, which was to just get rid of them and let him have however many accidents it takes for his brain to key in.

Which, for the last two mornings, has meant that he goes to bed and is fine right up until about 5:45 in the morning, when he comes into our room and says, "Mommy...? I had an accident."

We're double-sheeting his bed, so it only takes a couple of minutes to get him into clean pajamas and strip the wet sheets off the bed and put him back down... but by then it's almost 6 and the boy is Awake.

And Matt and I, manifestly, are Not.

He willingly lies down and is mostly quiet for the ten minutes it takes for our alarms to start going off, at which point he appears back in our room. "Mommy? I heard the music. I wanna snuggle."

Which is code for, "I want to play with Daddy and possibly lean my elbow on your boob," so you can imagine that it means we're pretty much done sleeping.

So far, he's gone to bed in underpants three times. So far, we've had to wash four sets of sheets. I may need to start going to bed at 9:30 again and just getting up when he has his accident at 5:45, if it goes on like this. Or possibly, set an alarm to wake him up and take him to the potty at 3, when it's still late enough that we can all go back to sleep afterward.

***

I had my day off from the Day Job yesterday. I try to use my days off as writing days (by preference) or to run errands and do chores. I'd wanted to get together with Lynn to talk about a book we want to work on together, but her daughter turned up sick with what turned out to be strep throat, so that was out. So I figured I'd just take my iPad over to Panera and have a regular writing day.

Except that as I took the kids to school, I was yawning obsessively. And my eyelids were heavy. After I'd dropped Alex off and was on the way to Penny's school, I twice had lights change fortuitously quickly, so I didn't even have to stop -- and was frustrated by that (usual) good luck, because I desperately wanted to be able to bring the car to a complete stop so I could close my eyes and doze for a minute.

(It's probably a good thing that Lynn couldn't meet me, because the hour-ish drive down to her place would've been unreasonably dangerous, and I doubt I'd have been in any shape to focus on the topic at hand once I got there.)

When I'd dropped Penny off and gotten back home, I thought about making myself a cup of coffee so I could buck up and get on with my writing, and then I decided that I had the day off, and rather than settle for the quick patch that would get me through, I should take the actual fix and get some extra sleep. So I changed back into my jammies and crawled into bed, thinking I'd nap for an hour or so and then get up and just write through lunchtime instead of breakfast. No sweat.

Except that I didn't wake up until 12:30. Well, I do fuzzily recall opening my eyes at 11, thinking I should probably get up, and then going back to sleep. I'm pretty sure that doesn't count.

That's easily a three and a half hour nap. Maybe more. Apparently, my tank was running emptier than I'd thought. It's entirely possible that I could've slept another hour or so if I'd really tried, but by then I was starving. So I got up and ate lunch, and then decided the day was a wash for writing. Instead, I purged the clothes and toys in Alex's room, filling two trash bags with clothes to donate, one with stuffies he hasn't so much as looked at in a year, and another with a Little People set he hasn't played with since about two weeks after I took it out of the box, all of which I took to the CHKD thrift store near us while Matt was picking Penny up from school.

My next day off, I may tackle Penny's room. She actually plays up there, though, so it'll be harder to figure out what to keep and what to junk.

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