This morning Seconda climbed into my bed and literally pried my eyes open with her fingers. I felt like the guy in A Clockwork Orange. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, that’s not a good thing.
“Wake up Mommy!” she yelled, “OPEN YOU EYES!”
This is not as easy as she makes it seem. Opening my eyes in the morning, in fact, takes a monumental effort. Sweet sleep beckons me not to leave the bed. Darling, delicious sleep murmuring sweet nothings in my ear, while Seconda shouts
“Are you awake Mommy? MOMMY! YOU HAVE TO OPEN YOU EYES!!!!!”
The last accompanied by another vigorous eye-pry.
I have been particularly knackered lately. Conked out. Cooked. Fried. Flattened by fatigue. I mean, it’s not like the surreal haze of the newborn days when I didn’t know if it was day or night and I would just loose my boob every time I heard a noise that at all resembled a baby cry. This is just your garden-variety cumulative exhaustion.
So in the mornings, after my eyes are pried open by small dirty fingers, I’ve taken to shuffling over to the TV, bringing up some grade-A children’s programming and basically going back to sleep.
This is fine when it’s Primo that’s awake because he is 4/5 and pretty responsible. Seconda, on the other hand, must be heavily monitored at all times. She is drawn to trouble, this one. But I have been so friggin’ tired lately that the other day after I put the Backyardigans on for her, I lay on the couch and just closed my eyes, just for a minute.
When David came home from the coffee shop at 8 am, he found Sec with a paci in her mouth. Pacifiers are strictly limited to sleeping time but since Sec knows where we stash them, since she can climb chairs until she reaches that drawer, and since she was unsupervised while I dozed on the couch, why, she had her choice of pacis. Not only did she have the paci in her mouth but she was standing on our garbage can and had just pulled down a bar of Perugina chocolate which she was in the process of unwrapping when David walked in.
“Where is Mommy?” he asked.
She didn't bother taking the paci out of her mouth: “She can’t open her eyes.”
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