Fatigued Soccer

Somehow Atticus sprinted and dribbled and kicked his way through nearly one entire soccer season with his mother taking nary a picture, despite him both loving the game and being really quite good at it.

Finally, though, I managed to get my act together.

As ever, click to embiggen.

It was a good game, and according to Derek he played well.  (I always think he plays well, even when he has apparently done something less than great.  This is because I am still baffled that any child of mine could have so much as a modicum of athletic talent.  This boy has dodged all the genetic bullets my DNA could throw at him, which let me assure you, are legion.)

He, like, runs toward the ball, over and over, and chases after it for close to one hour straight.  This is amazing.  Let's also take a moment to appreciate the kid above on the right who may be having some kind of existential crisis.  "But why do we chase the ball?"  I feel you, buddy.

As well as he played though, and as happy as I was to have finally remembered the camera, it was kind of a tough game to watch.  Atticus is normally more or less tireless during these games of his, but on this Saturday, he was sluggish and slow compared to his normal self.  He would kick the ball, or pass it, or whatever, but then instead of sprinting after it as usual he'd just stand there, or walk.  I couldn't figure out what was wrong with him until Derek said, "Well, he didn't get any sleep last night, remember?"

Oh.  Right.  Night terrors.

We've experienced the effects of our son's night terrors for years now, but it was still pretty upsetting for me to see it so clearly, how exhaustion was keeping him from doing his best.  I realize it's just a kids' soccer game, with minimal repercussions, but watching all those other kids bounce around out there, it was evident how different Atticus's reality is from theirs.  And that sucks.

How to tell if Atticus had a rough night:  look for the bags under his eyes (illustrated above) and the thousand-yard stare.  Same goes for his parents, with the addition of slow download speeds for his mom.  Please allow an extra ten seconds' worth of blank staring when asking her a question. 

The day after this game, though, I was talking to another parent about her little girl, who has Type I diabetes, and who has had to re-orient her family's life around this diagnosis.  It was a good reminder that all families have invisible struggles, from night terrors to diabetes to children who give their mothers that birthed them a hard time about listening to Christmas music in October.  THERE IS NEVER A BAD TIME TO LISTEN TO CELTIC CHRISTMAS, OKAY, UNGRATEFUL PROGENY?

Know who he reminds me of, though, in this red jersey of his?

Especially when he's looking all tall and stuff?

His dad.

He's the tall one in the middle there.  Comparing the two, I'd say the genes are strong in this one.

Maybe Yoda had night terrors, too.

Soccer season is now over, which Atticus is already grieving.  I'm excited about the time this frees up, but am wise enough not to say so.  It's already given us extra orchard time!

Recovery Days Are Vital

Today is one of those that didn't really have a beginning, as last night blurred and bled through to this morning.  Such is the case when you're up close to a dozen times to calm your screaming, night terror-stricken child.  The past couple weeks have been a waxing period of terrors, with last night being the worst so far in this cycle, so my hope is that they'll begin to wane from here and we'll all get a nice recovery period.  

Gracious, sometimes my senseless optimism appalls even me.

Completely, totally me today.

So we're sticking close to the house today, because to do otherwise would be folly, especially for anyone unlucky enough to cross my path and say such provoking things as "Hello," and "Good to see you!"  

At some point during the night/morning/day/what does time even mean anymore, I decided to just give it up and go for a run.  I'd planned on a morning run, anyway, to stay ahead of the heat.

This ended up being a good idea for two important reasons:  I got to bear witness to another summer sunrise over Iowa, and I had so much cranky frustration still sizzling over me at my turn-around point I decided to run an extra couple miles, leaving all that emotional tar smeared over the trail rather than on our children.  I got home and collapsed for a couple blissful hours, as said children are finally getting the hang of sleeping in.  Kind of.  

After so many years, I've got a pretty decent formula for what our day needs (yes, needs) to look like after a bad, bad night.  Everyone gets more chores than usual, which perhaps doesn't sound like the ingredients for a magical childhood but hello, have you seen Mary Poppins?  That chick knew what she was talking/singing about.  I give a rousing speech on pulling together and working hard and the importance of contributing to our collective household, with the promise of an after-chore movie of my choosing, because there are perks to being the mother.  

Now, while I will not lead you to believe that the kiddos in question skip merrily around the domicile, sweeping and dusting, I will say that if we're all working at the same time, I get very little flack from said munchkins, and I'm in a way better mood when the house is in order, because if Momma ain't happy, etc, etc; the opposite is also true.  

It's Atticus's night to help with supper, so the bulk of his work was on supper prep.  He made his first blackberry cobbler, chosen because it's super simple and absolutely capable of being executed by a seven year old.  Please note that the blackberries contained therein are store-bought, as I am still shuddering over last week's wild berry incident.

He also made crock pot fixin's.  I didn't get a picture of those because they're not as exciting as cobbler.  I mean, what is?  

After all that, we settled down to watch The Wizard of Oz, which all of our children have either read or listened to on audiobook, but only Adelaide has seen the movie, and that was several years ago.

Two out of three Crisler offspring thoroughly enjoyed it.  That third one noted, "That's not what Kansas looks like!"  Then he cocked his head, squinted, and said, "Well, sometimes it does, a little."

Did you know that L. Frank Baum had never been to Kansas when he wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?  He based his descriptions of my home state on his travels across Nebraska.  I have a decided opinion on this, but being a Christian woman, I can't say it.

Tomorrow we'll venture back out to the land of the living, hopefully at least marginally rested; I already feel better for our little mini-vacation/staycation.  Several times today I've given thanks for the fact that our lives have the flexibility to enjoy a day like this one when we need it.

On a barely related note:  How do you feel about this new term "staycation"?  I vacillate between almost liking it and wanting it to burn in modern vocabulary hell.  

Who Needs Sleep, Anyway?

Atticus is currently in one of his severe cycles of night terrors.  You may recall that they were nothing but severe for a few years, but at this point, we have days or even weeks where he only has a couple episodes a night, and sometimes not at all.  We love those nights.  Those nights are paradise.

The past couple weeks have not been paradise.

At the beginning of a more terror-strewn time, you think, Well, maybe it was just a bad night.  A few days later it's, Week, then.  Maybe it's a bad week.  Around the two week point, Derek and I begin throwing around words like "despair" and "horrific," and not in a joking manner.  It's pretty bleak.

This time around, I've been thinking about how this ever-present fatigue affects my running.  My level of perceived exertion does not reflect my actual pace in any way.  I finish my run feeling like I worked hard, then discover I was moving relatively slowly.  Running is harder when you're tired, but then, so is everything else.

At this point, thankfully, we've been dealing with our son's night terrors for so long that I know what kind of adjustments I need to make to my day in response to many consecutive nights of little sleep.  I'm getting up a dozen or more times a night, then spending a long time with a screaming-yet-asleep seven-year-old.  It is no longer strange to me to wake up on the floor of the hallway between bedrooms, or at the foot of Atticus's bed, etc, etc.  My day just can't look the same after a night like that.

Really, it reminds me of spoon theory, which you may or may not be familiar with.  It's an excellent illustration a young lady with lupus used to describe to her friend what it's like to live with chronic illness.  It's a powerful metaphor, but a little different for us, as having a child with night terrors is quite obviously different.  Atticus will most likely grow out of these.  (Pleeeeaaaase God.)  You don't outgrow lupus, or any number of other "invisible" illnesses.

I liken it more to a battery, or the symbol of a battery I can see on the bottom right hand corner of my laptop screen  right now.  Each night, my battery is mostly depleted, so I go to sleep.  In the morning, hopefully my battery is completely charged, and I'm running at 100% power.

After a bad night of night terrors, the best I can hope for is to wake up at 90% power.  But hey, 90% is fine!  I can operate at 90%!

Oh, except the effects of sleep deprivation are cumulative.  So after another night, I wake up- or I stay up because I've spent more time awake than asleep- and I'm at 80%.

Then 70% on the third morning.  And on.  And on.

Now, obviously and gloriously the human body doesn't work the same as a laptop battery.  After ten bad nights, I'm not at 0%.  I really can't tell you what my bottom threshold is, just that I function differently when I've been exhausted for a long time.  My response time is slower.  I have trouble writing.  I used the word "adjustment" up there, and it took me a solid thirty seconds for my brain to wend its way around to that very common noun.  My patience is short, and I have a tendency to snap at people, especially if they push me on anything, even if it's well-intended.  ("Hey, you should try such-and-such."  "Yeah, I can't right now, but thanks."  "No, you really should, because-" "I wasn't kidding.  I CAN'T.")  I have about one pleasant response in me for each person, and after that, I'm afraid you get to see my frustration straining at its leash to bite your face.  It's marvelous.

So what do I do?  I still run, which seems paradoxical, but although difficult, it's important to my mental health, and it helps what little sleep I do get.  When I don't exercise, I don't sleep well.  Running seems to help me fall asleep faster and improves the quality of my sleep, even after getting up multiple times a night.

I'm also more careful about what I eat.  Now, ideally, I would do this all the time, but, well, I just don't.  Me and Cheetos are like

I can't afford to do that when I'm not getting enough sleep.  If I'm not recharging my battery at night, I have to do what I can to add small amounts of energy during the day, and nutrient-dense foods are one source of fuel.

I also say "no" a lot more.  My top priorities are Derek, kids, bible study, running, and probably a couple other things I can't think of right now because so tired, so if it doesn't fall under one of those categories, it's gone for a while.  This has led to some super fun conversations after I've said I can't be involved in certain things for the time being.  The good thing is, when you're tired, you care a whole lot less.

I'm very careful with the kids.  I try to pay a lot of attention to my voice, because if I focus on my volume and tone, I find I'm less likely to get irritated or angry or impatient with them.

Now I'm going to go fuel (Noosa yogurt, you complete me), and compose an email to Atticus's teacher; when he's been running low on sleep for quite some time, he seems to hold it together for school, then falls apart when he gets home, but I need to alert his teacher, just in case.  I am happy he works so hard to behave at school, even if it makes some of our time at home a bit rough.  

Ask me if I feel the same way today at 4 PM.  I definitely won't bite your head off.

A Sickly, Juicy, Kaleidoscope-y List

Last time I posted I finished with "Next time I'm going to write about this picture here," but I swear to you, the best way for me to guarantee a specific topic will NEVER be written about is for me to tell you that it will, because when I do that I think about it and I think about it and then I think about it some more, to the extent that by the time I have a chance to sit down and actually write about the promised topic, I'm so bored with it that I can't force myself to dedicate another minute to the now-dreaded post.

All that to say, here is instead a list of what's going on around here.

• I need to give a big fat prayer of thanksgiving to the Head Honcho, because we are a healthy family.  So healthy, in fact, that when one of our children gets sick, it's such a novelty to me that I almost get excited about it.

Before you turn away in abject disgust, let me clarify by saying that he wasn't super awful sick.  He wasn't vomiting or writhing in pain; he just had a fever and was a little clingy and cuddly and the whole thing lasted less than 24 hours over the weekend.  It was Sick Lite, just enough for me to let go of my weird tv thing and introduce our children to the first Harry Potter movie, after which Adelaide proved that she is sometimes my exact twin:  "I liked it.  I think I liked it.  But they left out so much that was in the book!  And they changed some things!  Maybe I didn't like it.  No, I did.  The book was just SO MUCH BETTER.  I need to go back and read the first one so I can review all the things they did wrong in the movie."  I'm not saying that's a perfect opinion, but I am saying it's identical to mine.  (IT'S PERFECT.)

• Now that I've alienated everyone with my "I love it when our children are ill and miserable!" (WHICH I DON'T, OKAY?), let me remind everyone that one of our kids suffers from severe night terrors, meaning Derek and I have been chronically short on sleep for years.  (That's right, Judgey McJudgers, you just let that guilt soak in.  Wear it like a blanket- no, like a Snuggie!  A Guilt blanket with sleeves:  How dare you judge us?)  Anyhoo, we've tried anything and everything, dah dee dah, but that doesn't stop my ears from perking up anytime I hear magical words like, "Such and such absolutely 100% helps me sleep."  So when Lauren Fleshman, a pro runner, said that tart cherry juice has become a sleep aid for her pro triathlete husband, I sat up a little straighter in my chair and click, click, clicked my way to the available research.

NOW:  Is most of the research being trumpeted by cherry producers?  Yes.  I'm well aware of that and going into this eyes wide open.  I'm also not thinking that tart cherry juice is a magic elixir and our son will now stop his nocturnal screaming forevermore; what I am thinking is that a little juice every evening isn't going to hurt him, it's healthy anyway, and it's worth a shot.  Plus it was at the grocery store, which means it was meant to be.  (Or that grocery stores stock things that they believe will make them money.  Whatever.)

• One of our children's- as well as my own- favorite things about our local public garden is this:

Really, why is it that the simplest ideas are so often the best?  The plantings are changed out regularly, and we never fail to delight in looking into those microscope/kaleidoscope things, twisting them to change the view of design and color.

Lully: An Update

We're going on night 5 of using the Lully, and it's been... interesting.  An hour and a half after Atticus falls asleep, Derek's phone ding-a-lings, letting us know that it's time to go upstairs and stand creepily over our son, or as the app says it, "Time to turn on Lully!"

Hello, Lully.  I love your gray and purple color scheme.  Please work.

We (or often just Derek) then troop up the stairs and into the boys' room, Derek taps the purple "On" button on his phone, and the floor begins to shake.

It's actually Atticus's bed that vibrates, the Lully being located under his mattress, but it does it with such force that we can feel its effects under our feet where we stand next to the bed, too.  It's like one of those infant bouncy seats that features a vibrate switch, but on steroids.  Between the physical force of the vibrations and the loud humming sound it makes, it's amazing Atticus doesn't wake up- if he did, the instructions specify that you turn off the Lully, and that you're done for the night; in other words, you do not want the kid to awaken.  Small movements on the part of the sleeper when the Lully switches on are permitted, as long as they stay asleep.  So far Atticus has slept right through all that buzzing and vibrating, which hopefully means it's keeping him from entering that phase of sleep where night terrors occur (Lully employs the scheduled awakenings technique of combating sleep disturbances).  It would appear that it is... to an extent.

The Lully is designed to vibrate your kid once a night, for a period of three minutes, and this is supposed to keep the night terrors at bay for the entirety of the night.  It's been a pretty bad week of sleep for Atticus, which was somewhat expected, as last week he had some pretty good nights of sleep, and his good nights/bad nights tend to cycle, but we have noticed that the terrors are happening significantly later in the night than usual.  So, the Lully is working... kind of?  It's hard to tell.  I'm curious to see how many terrors he suffers from in the coming weeks, when we're in what should be a good part of the cycle.  As ever when experimenting with ways to combat our son's night terrors, hopes are high(ish), but expectations are low.  It's the only way to maintain sanity.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

I had plans today for this blog, plans for posts about nieces and family visits and running and humidity.

But then I stepped outside.  I crossed the street to our mailbox, opened it up, and hit the motherlode.

Oh, you thought "motherlode" referred to silver or gold or some other precious metal?  Nay, friends, this is a motherlode:



ONE

A gift card to the grocery store that opened right about a week ago right here in Brave New World, Iowa.  Now, our town is sufficiently small enough that we did not previously have a grocery store, but when it was announced around a year ago that Fareway was coming to town, well, the community just about lost its collective mind.  You have no idea.  People could not have been more excited if the President himself had decided to build a vacation home in our town- you know, to take advantage of the many amenities we have to offer, like, um... mile upon mile of corn fields, and... plenty of hog farms.  It's a glamorous life we live around here, now with A GROCERY STORE!  (You know those overly excited people I mentioned?  I was undoubtedly one of them.)  And now they're sending out gift cards?!  Come on down, Mr. President:  The corn is ripe and the bacon is plentiful.  Amen.



TWO

A Breck's Wholesale Catalog, because do you know how many tulip bulbs I plant each fall?  Neither do I, but the number is generally in the hundreds, because I can be the tiniest bit obsessive about some things, and tulips are most definitely one of those things.  I've always been satisfied with the bulbs I get from Breck's- good-sized and healthy- and I haven't been able to find better prices yet anywhere else.  This year I've got my eye on the Salmon Impression Tulip and World Impression Tulip.  Their Anemone blanda mixture is also enticing, although I have a tough time spending my spring flower budget on anything other than tulips.  Only three months until bulb planting, squeeee!





THIRD AND FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY

The sight of this package executed the twisted feat of filling me with tempered excitement and riddling me with anxiety, because apparently when my hopes begin to lift and float up where they don't belong, I get nervous.

Okay, so you know how Atticus has night terrors?  Horrifying, screaming, out-of-control, unconscious episodes that have perforated around 80%-90% of the last four years' of our family's nights?  Remember how we've tried everything?  Remember the mountains of advice we've received from people (people:  doctors, nurses, teachers, friends, family, strangers, google), how we've tried and tried and tried different things, but thus far our family has proven the depressing info you find in just about all of the medical literature:  That there's nothing you can really do except stay calm (you know, FOR YEARS) until they grow out of it?

Well, this box contains the newest thing we're trying, "thing" being the Lully.  My mom- who, bless her, has trolled the internet and special subscription-only medical databases and gone to sleep disorder seminars at her school nurse conferences, all trying to help us- she heard about the Lully via npr (who else hears or reads those three little letters and thinks, "Me!  I'll try it!  My hand is up, up, up!"), where their tech section did an article on this brand-spanking-new product, this pod-thing that you put under the afflicted child's mattress, sync up the associated app, and over a period of four weeks the Lully vibrates during a specific part of El Screamo's sleep cycle, not enough to wake them fully, just enough to disrupt and ward off the oncoming sleep disturbance.

The scary part is that this product did crazy-good during its testing and beta trials.  Hope is a fragile thing, and at this point it's near-exhausting to feel it stir its brittle limbs, ready to once again haul itself up and try, try again.  You'd think that at this point nothing would be capable of raising it, but my hope is evidently like a dust bowl farm, hard-scrabble and dry but still there, waiting for the (most likely nonexistent) rain.  I haven't even been able to summon the courage to open the box, but once we get this thing out and ready, you can most likely expect Lully News to dominate the posts around here for some time to come.

Unless it doesn't work at all for Atticus.  Which it probably won't.  (Unless it does!)

A List

• My sister Steph sent me a text yesterday that read "A movie for Atticus."

I can only assume this horror movie is being made by people who have been stalking Derek and me for the past few years, as I'm pretty sure the above is exactly what I look like after a night of our Atticus's night terrors.  I bet this whole movie is a dramatization of what would happen if the parents of night terror-stricken children acted on the irrational and murderous thoughts that run through our brains after years of sleep deprivation.  I'm expecting a new source of income from these film-makers and will use it to invest in a set of fancy ear plugs.  

• It's warm outside today.  So warm that, when Caedmon and I dared to venture out back, he declared it to be "super hot out here!"  He then asked if he could play with play dough (not Play-Doh, because I make our own play dough for pennies as opposed to spending whole dollars on the store-bought stuff), because I am a mean, mean mother who will only let her children near play dough when they are safely outside the confines of her house.  We busted out the play dough I made a couple years ago, but it's starting to get a little overly sticky, so he asked that I make a new batch.  I did, and am now "the best mom ever!"  One of the best parts of having small children is the ability to impress with a little flour, salt, and cream of tartar.  

Amazing how you go from this:

To this just five minutes later:

My aunt Sherry has said that you can use a packet of Kool-Aid instead of food coloring if you also want scented play dough, but I never think to buy Kool-Aid when I'm at the store.  Do people still drink that stuff?  Do they still make that stuff?

A bonus to fresh-out-of-the-pot play dough is that you can use it to warm your hands outside, because what Caedmon and I thought was "super hot" outside turned out to be about 35 degrees.  Warmth is relative, friends.

Sure, I had to clean bits of ice off the table before he could play, and no, he didn't really have a chair to sit in because those go in our basement during the winter, but that still beats digging dough out of our rugs.  

• Caedmon has a bit of a cold.  Nothing too bad (as long as I don't catch it), but enough for him to occasionally run to Adelaide for a bit of comfort.

This is pretty much the cutest thing ever, and yet another benefit to having a four-year-old.

Night Terrors Are The Worst. No, Really. They Are.

If you've read this blog or known our family for any length of time, you know that our son Atticus suffers from night terrors.  Nightmares.  Sleep disturbances.  We don't know exactly what they are, we just know there's a lot of terror, and they occur at nighttime, so... night terrors it is.

They began sometime shortly after he turned two, and they continue to this day (night, whatever).  He's turning five next month.

That's three years of sleeplessness.

The good news:  They've gotten better.  Like, a lot better.  Whereas before he was up every fifteen minutes for several hours in a row, it's now down to a few times a night (usually).  He also calms down a heck of a lot faster (again, usually).  I don't know if this is because he's learned how to simmer down more quickly, or we've developed better coping mechanisms.  (The key:  Staying calm.  This sounds simple, but simple doesn't always equal easy, people.  Try keeping your cool in the middle of the night when your preschooler is screaming and/or crying and you're exhausted and you have two other small children you would like to stay asleep.  Oh yeah, and it's the eighth time in a row you've had to comfort him that night.)  If it's shaping up to be a rough night, I'll sometimes lie down next to him, because as long as someone's right there beside him, he seems to have fewer episodes and he's much faster to calm down.  We've also noticed that because he's completely asleep when the screaming starts, it's helpful to take him into the bathroom, turn the light on, and coax him awake.  I often do this by noisily cleaning the bathroom (this is another rough night trick- it doesn't normally come to this anymore).


Now, generally when people find out about this, they want to help.  Or they look aghast the more you talk, especially when they grasp the fact that this is every night.  Every night, friends.  (Actually, now that I think about it, I think we've had three nights this past month where we got to sleep through the night.  THIS IS HUGE.)

Back in the early days of this whole... struggle, I guess you could call it, I was not always super gracious about all this advice I was getting.  Oh, I usually acted gracious, but inside, not so much.  Anytime someone started a sentence with, "Have you tried...?" I wanted to cut in with "YES.  Whatever it is, YES WE HAVE."  Because about a year in, it felt like we really had tried everything, short of an exorcism.  (Don't think it hasn't crossed my mind; my sisters married into a big ol' Catholic family, with a priest for an eldest brother and everything.  Something could be arranged.)  

I have since come to realize that all those people, with all that advice?  They just want to help.  (Revolutionary, right?  I have no idea how this head contains all these brains.)  They are almost unanimously well-meaning.  Good intentions abound.  It's not their fault Derek and I haven't slept in three years, and this has made us by turns irrational/ quick to anger/ loopy/ impatient/ mentally incapacitated/ stressed out.  You do know sleep deprivation is a legitimate form of torture, right?

Atticus is also becoming more articulate, which means he can tell us what's going on.  Rarely does a day go by where he doesn't tell me what last night's dream was about, and let me tell you what, those things are scary.  "Last night I dreamed about sharks that were just swimming through our house and I was trying to run away from them but every time they caught me it was in the kitchen and then they would take a bite from my arm."  Ooookay.  "Last night I dreamed there was this big bug in our room and every time you camed in it would hide but when you left and turned out the light it came out and kept eating all my hair and tried to climb in my mouth to sleep on my teeth."  Um, what?  "Last night I dreamed there were bad guys that didn't have guns but they had lots of little knives and they were hiding in the backyard waiting for me to come play on the trampoline."  Kid, how do you even go outside during the day with that in your head?


If you're like practically every person I've ever talked to about this, you might have a suggestion as to what would help.  At this point, I really am curious to hear other people's suggestions, if only because it tends to be so varied (and to be honest, just plain weird sometimes), but because we've heard so many suggestions in the past, how's about you check out the handy dandy list I'll (hopefully) post tomorrow detailing all the advice we've gotten from friends, family, doctors, and complete strangers, which ones we've tried, which ones we haven't, and which ones I felt more than mildly insulted by.  It'll be fun!





This certainly isn't the first time I've blogged about night terrors; find the other posts here and here and here. There've been a bunch of other times but I really don't feel like slogging through and trying to find them all.

Not So Comforting

About a month ago, Derek and I bought a new comforter for our bed.  We had spent the previous several months hunting for an inexpensive new one that we both found attractive enough to sleep under every night, which turned out to be about as difficult as agreeing on names for our children.

I once read that a true compromise has been reached when nobody is happy.  If this is true, then our new comforter is a perfect compromise.  Neither of us really loves it, but it's not nearly as hideous as I found most of his previous suggestions to be, and he doesn't make his You have got to be kidding me face when he sees it like he did with all my other bedding-related suggestions.

There has been an unforeseen problem with this particular comforter, however.

Most nights, Derek and I take turns going in to settle Atticus down after one of his night terrors.  It's gotten to the point where he can be calmed relatively quickly, meaning we don't have to fully awaken, which further means we can usually fall back asleep almost immediately after returning to bed.

The majority of the population experiences this kind of not-quite-awake state in the mornings, often before they've had one or two or five cups of coffee.  We don't drink coffee in this house; Derek because he doesn't like it, me because it gives me a stomachache.  And yes, I do see that as a kind of tragedy.

My point is, you know what I'm talking about when I say not-quite-awake-but-still-not-asleep.  I'm not the most cheerful person in that frame of mind (although I've also never accused a loved one of petty theft, nor have I tried to stab anyone when half-awake, Kelli).

This isn't usually a big deal in the middle of the night.  I quiet Atticus, return to bed, go back to sleep.

Except now it's:  Quiet Atticus, return to bed, engage in surprisingly bloodless battle with the comforter, go back to sleep.

The problem, of course, is ridges.

The new comforter has these stripes, these raised ridges that run horizontally across the width of the material, and for whatever reason, when I'm in the throes of that irrational half-consciousness, those ridges are infuriating.  As it turns out, when I pull the blankets over my tired body, all I want is blessed smoothness, not bumps and irregularities and ridges.

To my exhausted diurnal brain, the obvious solution is that the blanket needs to be punished.  As it turns out, however, kicking and tearing and twisting a comforter is about as worthwhile as you would think fighting something with the name "comforter" would be.

It's actually a lot like trying to hang up on person while talking on a cell phone.  Remember how wonderfully satisfying it was to hang up on a person with a corded phone?  You really felt like your displeasure was being communicated when you could slam that receiver onto its base.  Now?  All you get to do is push a tiny button, and no matter how violently or with what amount of malevolence you push it, you're still just pushing a button.


I'm not really sure what the answer is here.  Keep the (smooth, no frills) old comforter tucked under my side of the bed to use at night?  Train myself to sleep with only a sheet, aka be freezing cold all night?  See a shrink?

I don't know, but I have a sudden urge to buy an old phone at a garage sale just so I can hang up on someone.

You Should See The Other Guy- Er, Chicken

This morning, Atticus came down the stairs, crept around the corner trying to sneak up on me (like he does just about every morning), then jumped out, yelling, "BOO!"

I pretended to be startled (like I do just about every morning).

Then he said, "Hey, mom, I had bad dreams last night."

"Oh, yeah?  What happened in your bad dreams?"

"There was this chicken and it just kept pecking at my eye."

At that point I noticed that there was a little scratch near his eye, so I moved him into the light, got a good look, then grabbed my camera to take some pictures.  Because I'm a good parent.

That must have been one mean chicken.