Oh no he didn't!

The kids have had a rough week sleep-wise. There was the day Seconda decided to wake at 3am and start her day nice and early. And I don’t know what’s in the air but the nightmares have been turned on full-force, and one or the other child has woken up at least one a night screaming from bad dreams. Poison! Fire! Monsters!

Over the weekend, Primo woke at 4:45am, and I quickly ushered him into our bed, because if he’s awake alone, there’s a chance I can get him to go back to sleep, or at least watch TV while we sleep but if he wakes his sister, we are not only up shit’s creek without a paddle but without a boat. We will DROWN in shit’s creek if both he and his sister are awake. So I brought him into bed with us and he did doze off but slept so fitfully it was really hard to tell he was asleep.

“NO!” he yelled in his sleep, “DON”T LET SECONDA GET IT!!”

I find it hilarious that he spends his sleeping hours worrying about the same thing he does while awake. Must keep the prized possessions away from ratty kid sister. This is the stuff that (bad) dreams are made on . . .

So, what with all this, I woke this morning dog-tired. You know when you get so tired that nothing can wake you -- even the children jumping on you in bed and screaming as they kick and punch each other and reporting to you that their brother or sister is eating an entire box of cookies. That’s how tired I was.

David came home from his workout to find me still in bed. He brought me a cup of coffee and I slowly began to join the land of the living.

“I am just SO TIRED.” I moaned, “I don’t know why.”

Which was just something to say, not true at all. Of course I do know why, precisely why and the reason for my fatigue is my kids wake me up all night with piercing screams of pain and agony.

But instead of assuring me that I had plenty of good reason to be tired, my husband, issued a highly ill-advised reply.

“Well’’, he said, “You’re not as young as you used to be/”

Gasp. Horror. Not even employing the courteous “we” as in “we’re not as young as we used to be.” Just a

balls-out announcement before 8am, before I’ve even gotten to the half-way point in my coffee, that I am OLD.

AND THAT”S NOT ALL.

He then continued on, in a perfect example of adding insult to injury: “And your metabolism is slowing down.”

“WHOA!” I cried,“Whoa now! Why do you need to bring my METABOLISM into this? I don’t see how that’s material whatsoever. There’s no call for that, no call for that at all.”

“I just mean –“

“Maybe you just shouldn’t say anything else, while I ponder on those nuggets for a while.”

Has this man never met me before? Is this our first time at the rodeo?

I think it was a teachable moment. For him, the lesson was, never throw around the word metabolism without serious forethought and certainly not in the same sentence as “you’re not as young as you used to be.” And for me, maybe a little less complaining, much as I do cherish it. I was born to kvetch. But, I guess, that’s what blogs are for.

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.

Close Quarters

My daughter is currently sleeping in the living room. Raw suckage. It might not be so bad if we had a house with a living room and a dining room, or a living room and an eat-in kitchen, or a living room and a large bathroom, or any alternate space where David and I could shut the door and eat a little food, watch a little TV. But our place has just has a living room. Which means when Seconda is in it, there is no quality living going on.

It reminds me of when David and I took Primo to Rome when he was 18 months old, and we stayed with my aunt, my cousin and their dog in a one bedroom in the heart of the centro storico. It is a beautiful apartment and it’s got some serious location going for it, but for five people and a dog with separation anxiety, it was a little . . . tight.

Being resourceful New Yorkers, though, we made it work. My aunt generously ceded the bedroom to us, so we put the baby to sleep in there first and all hung in the living room until about 11 when my aunt would crash with my cousin on the fold-out couch, I would hit the sack with Primo and David would retire to the bathroom.

Yes, for two weeks David’s nightlife consisted of sitting on the toilet (lid closed, there was just no where else to sit) and drinking a Peroni while reading his book. It wasn’t the Rome we’d experienced before we had kids, but it was about as much fun as my jetlagged, beleaguered husband could stand anyway.

So my brood is familiar with living in tight spaces. But this current sleeping arrangement is for the birds.

It’s not like Seconda starts out in the living room. She starts out in her crib in the room she shares with Primo, a perfectly normal set-up. But lately she’s been getting kicked out of there because she is prone to shrieking “WAKE UP PRIMO!” continuously, throwing toys at her brother and sometimes even leaning over far enough to grab hold of his hair and pull hard – all when he is trying to go to sleep (a tough thing to manage in and of itself seeing as Primo has become an indefatigable soldier in the war against bedtime). So when she pulls that crap, she’s booted to the pack n’ play in our bedroom, which adjoins the kids’ room.

There are any numbers of reasons why she is relocated out of our room, and they become more hazy as the hours creep past midnight. Usually its because she pulls the same shrieking, throwing routine as she does at bedtime, except in the middle of the night, and directed at David and I as we huddle under our duvet cover and pray for mercy Mercy, in this respect, is rare. So we drag that old pack n’ play into the living room and then when David passes through to get his stuff and head out of the house at 5:30am, she wakes again and when Primo wants to watch the Magic School Bus or draw with his markers or eat something at 6am, I tell him that wing of the house is off limits and the screaming that results wakes the baby. And then we are all miserable.

But, enough griping, although I know it’s what you come here for. If I wanted easy living, I’d move to California. I love this hard-knock, inconvenient, tough-shit, stinky, uncomfortable city. Sleeping in the living room builds character, I say.