True Story

You may recall the night, a few months ago, when my kids woke to start the day at 4:30am. Well, my daughter has beaten that record. And I hope her brother doesn’t try to outdo her.

She woke at 3am and DID NOT GO BACK TO SLEEP.

I can tell you think I’m exaggerating. I’d think I was, if I wasn’t there in the room watching her wriggle around and sing softy for THREE hours in – literally—the middle of the night. I thought to myself, “There is no way the child won’t go back to sleep. It’s not a borderline situation, the kind that occurs at 5am, where some people might actually consider it early morning. At no point in the year does the sun EVER consider 3am to be morning. And the sun is a morning expert."

. I tried to point this out to Seconda. I showed her the darkness that lay around us. I kept repeating the phrase “middle of the night.”

She was unconvinced. And I know why. Primo was also awake at 3am -- in fact I think it was his blood-curdling nightmare scream which woke her. And when Sec sees that Primo is awake, she will not stand down. She does not want to be duped into sleeping when he is awake. This is why she dropped her nap just after turning 2. So while Primo was coaxed back to sleep, she was not.

To her credit she stayed pretty still and quiet, but I knew she was awake because sleeping children do not sing all the words of “Whole New World” on repeat play,

It's pretty awful when you know, at 5:45 am that how you are feeling, after having been awake for three hours, is the best, is the most well-rested you will be feeling all day From that point on, your perkiness will only get more and more degraded, not only because you will have been awake more hours but because you will be taking care of a three year-old who STARTED HER DAY AT 3AM! A child who is intractable on a full night’s sleep does not grow more manageable after half a night’s rest.

But I did manage to do two things which saved my ass. A. I sent her to her Nonnie’s at 5:45 for two hours and got to sleep then (Nonnie had been up for hours, incidentally, and already cooked a pot of marinara sauce).And B. I miraculously persuaded her to take an hour nap at 2:30pm by telling her I would not take her to the end-of-the-year class party if she didn’t. I literally can’t remember the last night she napped in a place outside of the car, but I guess that’s what waking at 3am will do to a gal.

The only upside to these abysmal sleeping habits is that it affords me more of an opportunity to feel like a martyr. And I’ll have better baby stories to regale her with when she’s grown and brings boyfriends over for dinner.

Its 4:30am! Up and at 'em!

In the wee hours sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, I heard a child calling me from the kids' bedroom. As I made my way towards their room in the darkness, I tried to figure out which kid it was -- sounded like Seconda one second and Primo the next. When I opened the door to their room I discovered that it was BOTH Primo and Seconda, BOTH awake, and not just awake but wide awake, bright-eyed and bushy tailed. ALERT, like they’d drank a whole pot of coffee.

“Its time to WAKE UP Primo!” Seconda announced.

“I know, I know,” he grumbled at her, the way he always does like Archie Bunker did to Edith in All in the Family.

And he proceeded to climb down the ladder from the top bunk.

“GUYS!” I exclaimed (just short of yelling, thank you very much),”It is NOT time to wake up. It is the middle of the night,”

Then I looked at the clock to confirm.

4:30.

“It is the middle of the night. See how it is completely dark in here?”

They didn’t look convinced but they did lie back down. I knew as soon as I left the room though, one would try to keep the other awake so I opted to just crawl into the bottom bunk to make sure there was no monkey business. The bottom bunk is always vacant because Seconda sleeps on the floor. Please don’t get me started on how much money we spent on this damn bed which she never uses. The upside is we have an extra bed in the house.

So I crawled in there, and tried to fall back asleep while remaining totally alert so that I could put a lid on the child who piped up.

But for a good half hour, the children were silent. They were flopping and kicking and tossing about like a bunch of rhinos in their sleep spaces but there was no talking.

Then at 5am, Seconda repeated her announcement: “OK Primo, its time to wake up!”

He had been apparently at the ready, waiting for her command, because he was down the ladder in a few seconds.

“GUYS!” I yelled (full on yelling now), “It is NOT time to wake up! It is FIVE O’CLOCK!”

“But its light out Mommy!” Primo pointed out, gesturing to the slim sliver of sunlight which came in from the sides of his room-darkening shades. Damn that shade company for forcing me to leave ¼ of an inch on either side so I could raise and lower the blinds. Damn the sun for stirring shit up. No one in their right minds considers 5 am morning.

But that was it. Kids were up. Good morning.

The funny thing is, that’s not even the annoying part of the story.

Nest night, we put the kids to bed, terrified that this insanely early wake up would repeat. Then, at 1:30am, we heard two sounds you don’t want to hear in the middle of the night. Your child calling and the loud blaring of an alarm clock in their room.

“WHAT THE FUCK?” I whisper-yelled to David and we both jumped up and raced to the bedroom.

Yes, somehow the alarm clock had been turned up to full volume and set for 1:30am.

(This is one of those things that never happened before we had kids and now happens with disquieting frequency because the kids won’t keep their grubby little fingers off the alarm clock. They never accidentally set it for 1:30PM though, I’ll have you note),

David unplugged the infernal machine and I tucked Sec back in, begging the heavens not to wake the other one.

Because once they are both awake, the jig is up.

Heavens smiled upon us, and Sec went back to sleep without waking her brother.

But too close a call for my liking. I mean, come on. Give a girl a chance to get back on her sleep feet, right?

Daylight Savings Time can suck my ---

Honestly, who thought this shit up? I mean, I know it has something to do with farmers and harvests and probably has some pretty good justification but here is my opinion, in case anyone who is in charge of daylight savings time decisions is reading:

Daylight savings time is raw sewage.

I blame it for running my week. That and a massive, prolonged episode of procrastination which left me in a sour mood. But mostly, it’s the daylight savings time. Because the time change does not mean that I go to sleep an hour earlier, since hey, I’ve got shit to do, but it DOES mean that my kids wake up an hour earlier.Children will use any reason to wake an hour earlier than normal, especially that of bright lights streaming into their flipping window. I don’t have an hour of sleep to spare.

I LIKE it when it’s dark in the morning. I have spent so many mornings waking before the dawn’s early light with my children that I am in no way perturbed by the darkness. And listen, take it form me, there’s not much to see in the AM. At 5pm on the other hand, I’d like to run my kids in the playground for another hour until they are so exhausted they can not mutter a word of protest and can barely collapse into a heap in their beds. THAT’S what I work towards in the late afternoon and this infernal time change has dashed my plans.

Plus, look at the poor guy in the picture. Look at what a whole lot of trouble he's going through to make the clock tell the right time. He looks like he's about to get into a serious ladder accident, in fact, and if he does, I think he should SUE daylight savings time.

The Losing of the Nap

First off, let me be clear that this is not a picture of my child sleeping. If you knew me at all, you'd have guessed that for two reasons.

A. When my child does nap, I do not sneak in to snap photos of her sleeping. I do not crack the door for any reason whatsoever. I leave the child alone and I try to breathe as quietly as possible in the adjoining room.

B. My kid doesn't nap anymore.

Yes, readers, I am in the tumultuous terrain of the terrible twos, known far and wide (in my apartment) as The Losing of the Nap.

Before you stop me and say, “Whoa now, my kid didn’t drop her nap ‘til she was 4 or 5,” or better yet, “We’re European and my kid is 12 and still naps!” let me rush to qualify that I understand not all children lose the nap as part of the terrible twos. It’s just the particularly ornery ones that do, the ones that you need to sleep more than anything in the world, because it is those two hours of peace that allow you to grab onto the frazzled end of your sanity and make it through the rest of the day. These ornery, defiant, devil-may-care children are precisely the ones that have the nerve to drop their nap well before they no longer need the sleep, creating a total friggin’ mess in the process.

It goes like this:

Between 50-75% of the time, Seconda does not nap, even when I put her to sleep at the appointed time in the appointed place. She just stands in her crib tent, which is zipped tight, and yells or throws things or cries or sings loudly for an hour or two. I get no rest during that time since I am too busy sustaining a coronary. Then I finally let her out of imprisonment, for which she is very grateful and sweet, for exactly 20 seconds,

The moment her feet hit the floor, and freedom is assured, she begins to act like a total, unmitigated little shithead. This may sound mean. In fact, strike that. It does sound mean. It sounds terrible. But what you should take into account is that I am actually being generous because saying she’s a shithead is a tremendous understatement.

My mommy friend, Grace, who has two kids just the same age and Primo and Seconda came over for a playdate yesterday. Sec had opted out of the nap and when Grace and the kids arrived at 4pm, she was not just a hot mess but an atomic mess. While the other children played, she spent about an hour screaming, for a reason no one could understand.

Grace looked pained. She looked CONCERNED. While I ignored my own child’s screaming, she tried to fix whatever was wrong.

“Do you want some water?” Grace asked Seconda.

Screaming.

“Do you want a snack?"

Screaming.

“Do you want to play with the pirate hat?”

Screaming.

My well-intentioned friend, of course, got nowhere/ She could not fix what was wrong because what was wrong was that my daughter didn’t get the rest she needs to maintain her mental health. Her exhaustion makes her a crazy person. And not just her, either.

It’s like my toddler has colic. Can you begin to understand the implications of that? A baby who has colic can, ultimately, be put down for a few minutes and left to cry so that you can take a swig of whisky or whatever you need to do to get back on board. A toddler just follows you around screaming. Toddlers weigh a lot more than newborns and carrying them everywhere will give you a hernia. Toddlers, unlike newborns, will purposefully hit you in the eye and bite you on your arm. Toddlers should never get colic. But mine has it.

Now, between 25-50% of the time (and that’s a precise figure I calculated) Seconda DOES take a nap. What bliss! What rapture! I work, furiously, while Primo watches Noggin. In two hours, she wakes and I am restored, just like Lazarus. It is amazing. And she is in a good mood too, doesn’t have the colic, and we are best friends and snuggle together and I am happy.

Then bedtime approaches. David and I understand that since she’s napped, she probably won’t be quite as tired at 7:30, so bedtime creeps closer to 8:30. At 11pm she is still awake, jumping in her crib and yelling “PRIMO WAKE UP! PRIIIIIIIIIIIMMMMOOOOO!”

David and I have no evening whatsoever. I pass out in my bed, listening to her yell.

But that is not all, folks, That is not even the worst part.

The next morning, she wakes at 5am. Five o’clock in the miserable morning. And if I thought she had colic from missing her nap, she has a raging case of it when she sleeps for only 6 hours.

So. Scylla and Charybdis. Damned in I do and damned if I don’t.

This isn’t exactly what you imagine when you decide to go off your birth control.

Awake and Scream

What my son has been doing to me in the mornings can only be described as inhumane. Just after the daylight savings time switcheroo, he began waking at 5:30AM. And by waking, I mean rising and shining, starting his day. There are many problems with this arrangement.

First, since he no longer naps, by early afternoon he is, to use a clinical term, a “hot mess.” He is snarly, impertinent, unforgiving, inflexible and prone to temper tantrums and even then, I’m being generous. Now, a four year-old having a temper tantrum is not the same as a two-year old having one, at least not in my experience. Being double the age has given him double the stamina, and when he starts a freakout, I know I am in for a half hour minimum -- often longer -- of wild, raging hysteria that makes Stanley Kowalski look genteel. When he was a well-rested boy, these used to be infrequent but now that he’s up before the cock crows, well, they’re popping up daily.

But worse than his shitty behavior is the fact that when he wakes at 5:30, I wake at 5:30. I understand that not all families operate like this, because I have friends whose kids will wake up and fend for themselves until their parents rouse at the hour of their choosing. These children turn on the TV, pour a bowl of cereal, get dressed, and, I imagine, tidy up the house a bit, do the dishes, make a pot of coffee and lend a hand with the taxes.

My children wake and scream. Scream follows wake like exhale follows inhale. Since they sleep in the same shoebox-sized room, one’s waking-screaming tends to provoke the other’s waking-screaming. Bloody madness. So at the first hint of a scream, I dash over to Primo and whisper,

“It’s the middle of the night. It is not morning. Go back to sleep.” Then I tuck him in and scratch him back and tiptoe back into my bed.

Five to ten minutes later, just when I think he’s drifted off, another shout, “Mommy!”

I dash in again, significantly less patient and make desperate offers:

“If you go back to sleep, I’ll let you watch the Magic School Bus and give you a cookie and also a big surprise.”

When I start offering “big surprises” that he and I both know I don’t have and don’t intend to get, I’ve lost the battle. So when Primo creeps into my bed five minutes later, I am relieved that at least Seconda’s still sleeping. David’s out of the picture because he goes to the coffee shop just after 5am every morning to do some writing before clocking in at his office job. So there’s room in the bed and I tell Prim he can lie quietly next to me, if he stays still.

Fat chance. After five minutes of getting kicked and elbowed and listening to “The Plants Revolve Around the Sun” sung to the tune of “When Johnny Come Marching Home,” I give up on his sleeping. I send him into the living room, put on the TV and tell him he can do whatever the hell he wants as long as he doesn’t wake me up.

Five minutes later, he runs to my bedside, “Mommy, I need you to draw a vampire turning into a bat.”

No, I say, no no no. Absolutely not. Not on your life. It’ll be a cold day in hell. Which is it, I guess, five minutes later when I find myself sitting at the coffee table, with colored pencils in hand.
The worst part is that he is yelling at me, “That is NOT A GOOD BAT at all!!! Its eyes are WOBBLY! You RUINED it!”

The only reason I have conceded to this torture is that I am desperately, at all costs, trying to avoid at least waking the baby, because when she wakes too early, the misery she exacts on us makes Primo’s sunrise abuse look like a gentle caress. Seriously, it’s awful.

So there I am, 6am, listening to il Duce berate what I feel is a truly impressive rendering of Count Dracula in the process of turning into a bat. He doesn’t want just Count Dracula or just a bat but the actual METAMORPHOSIS which bridges the two.

I defend myself, not altogether too nicely, “Please remember that Mommy is not a PROFESSIONAL ARTIST!” I shout, “I’m just being NICE to do this and you’re being a total ----- (I bite my tongue and suck back the f word that threatens to spring from my ready lips) “---JERK!”

I haven’t made my coffee because I haven’t wanted to accept that this waking will be permanent, but now it is clear, that yes, this is it, this is the official start of my day, if only because the landlord’s going to come upstairs and evict us for all the screaming and yelling and clattering (because when I call him a jerk, Primo throws his colored pencils on the floor in a rage and starts to cry, “JERK IS NOT A NICE WORD!”). I should give him a time out, I should take away his pencils, I should force him to go back to bed, and I do nothing because I am too tired. This is why I say that exhaustion is the biggest impediment to responsible parenting, hands down.

And since I am always exhausted, this does not bode well for my mothering.


What do you do when your children wake before sun-up? Sedatives? Threaten to sell them to the gypsies? Reasonable strategies suggested by SuperNanny?