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.

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?

Mr. Coughie

Thanks to the astronomical levels of pollen, Primo has developed a non-stop convulsive cough. As with all maladies, it is much, much worse at night. Thanks ever so much for that, Mother Nature, because God knows my kids and I don’t need sleep, wouldn’t even know what to do with uninterrupted sleep if we stumbled upon it.

Primo’s had this hacking, gagging, horrific cough all night long for two weeks, and since the doc discovered he was wheezing last week, every time I hear his cough I instantly wonder if he’s wheezing and having bronchial spasms or whatever the hell the doc said was happening which caused the wheeze and which I am too afraid to look up, online

So he coughs. I try to sleep through it but cannot because I am seized with worry. Then I climb up into the bunk bed and scratch his back basically all night long with small intervals of sleep in between.

Motherhood.

And to think when he was a baby, I thought the sleep deprivation would only last a few months. Ha! It’s a good thing we don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into.

Then last night Mr. Coughie actually slept through the night without a single hacking episode. Which would have given me a well-deserved, delicious break – had not SECONDA started coughing at precisely the same moment he stopped.

Isn’t it always the way? A few weeks ago, I actually said to Primo: “When precisely did you have the talk with Seconda where you two decided that as soon as one of you stopped being sick, the other one would start and as soon as one of you was happy, the other would become unhappy and as soon as one of you was asleep, the other one would wake up?”

“We never had that talk, Mommy,” he said.

Then I felt like a total jerk to have sullied my son’s pristine earnestness with the stain of sarcasm.

So now I’ve got Mrs. Coughie. Technically she’s a Ms. I guess although that doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. And Mrs. Coughie is a much less grateful and manageable convalescent than her brother. She just coughs, cries, calls me and then once I show up, yells at me to go away. Repeat cough, cry, call and rejection.

“Do you want Mommy to scratch your back?”

“Nooooo.”

“Do you want Mommy to snuggle with you?”.

“Nooooo.”

“Do you want Mommy to give you some water?”

“Nooooo.”

“Do you want Mommy to go away?”

YES!

“Then WHY DO YOU KEEP CALLING MOMMY IN?”

It does beg the question.

Shit Storm

As I mentioned a few days ago, Sec has been ending up in bed with us somewhere around the 3am mark every night. It’s dismaying but neither David or I have the energy to break her of the habit, especially since it will involve lots of screaming which his sure to wake Primo and two awake children at 3am is much, much worse than one. So we’ve been grinning and bearing it for the time being but last night taking Sec into bed resulted in an actual, literal shit storm.

David tossed the kid next to me in his usual fashion and Sec moaned, “Diaper!” in her usual fashion. Though she’s pretty well potty trained during the day, the kid pisses like a racehorse in her diaper at night. By the middle of the night, that diaper weighs about 20 pounds. So I’ve taken to ripping it off of her when she rolls into bed with us in the wee hours. Since it is pitch dark, I do this without looking, usually with one hand, in a remarkably ungraceful, inefficient way that allows as much of me to remain on my pillow as possible. So last night, Sec says Diaper, and I roll over, undo the tabs and pull the diaper off of her without even pulling down her pants. It is only then that I smell it – that old, familiar, revolting stench that I, a mother of two children two years apart, know so very well. At first, I am in denial. Maybe I have to take the garbage out. Maybe its coming from outside? But the diaper is still in my hand and it is clear the foul pestilential stink is coming from the diaper.

“Oh shit,” I say, “SHIT!”

“Jesus Christ Nicole!” David shouts, sitting up in bed, “What did you do?”

“I just took the diaper off her like I always do,” I stammered.

“Didn’t you CHECK first to make sure it wasn’t full of SHIT???”

The great thing about me and David is we do really well under pressure.

“There’s shit EVERYWHERE!” he shouts.

“No shit,” I say, “Its all over MY HAND!!!!”

Lights on.
Shit all over our bed.
I scour my hands like Lady Macbeth.
Wet wipes out.
Sec cleaned.
Sec put on the floor, thankfully, still asleep, clearly relieved after her midnight evacuation.
Bed stripped.
Clean sheets located
Bed made.
Back in bed.

I use Lamaze breathing to avoid passing out from the lingering stink.

And then my daughter, that ornery little sucker who wouldn’t give you a kiss if your life depended on it, pulls my head over to hers and gives me the most magical, enchanting tiny little toddler kiss on my cheek. I positively swoon.

Just when you’re at your breaking point, they throw you a bone. And thank God for that.

Sleep Giggle

My daughter is now 3 years old but that doesn’t mean she is sleeping through the night., Every night sometime between 1 and 4, she wakes and though David used to be the designated Sec-soother, she has started to reject him lately which means either

1. David picks her up and brings her into our bed, so she sleeps with us all night kicking David so violently he moves into her bed ( Although I do have superkeen hearing,-I have trained my body to feel nothing in sleep so, as long as they were silent, a bunch of giants could play volleyball with me in my sleep and I'd never wake up. Its a Darwinian thing, like my ability to eat a meal in under 5 minutes.)

OR

2. I get up and try to sooth Sec back to sleep, usually falling asleep in bed with her

I’ve always thought that if you had to sleep with your kid for whatever reason, it was a better bet to sleep in their bed rather than vice versa, because you can always get up and leave their bed but just try kicking them out of yours. And that is why Primo hasn’t been in our bed since he was a toddler.

But since we’ve put the two kids in the same room, I’ve realized there is a big problem with me sleeping in bed with one of them. Once I’m in that room, it is as if they can sense my proximity and rouse themselves from sleep to start a tug of war with me. “Mommy!” calls Primo in the top bunk. And as soon as I’ve gotten him back to sleep I hear, “MAMA!” from the bottom bunk, and as soon as I’ve drifted back off its “AHHHHHH!” from the top bunk again, and on and on until morning has mercy and ends my servitude.

But last night something different happened:

As usual, Sec started crying at 3am and I automatically stood up, like a drone, crawled into her bed, slung my arm around her and collapsed into sleep within 30 seconds. Some time later, I was awakened by a strange sound coming from the bunk bed above me.

It was a giggle. A someone-said-the-word-“underpants” kind of giggle. I thought to myself, “Is the kid awake?

Has he just been lying there all night long quietly drawing pictures or talking to himself or something and he’s now giggling about it?” The thought was so unsettling I lay there, wide awake, listening for more sounds.

Then came a louder, more emphatic giggle. An I’m-watching-something-forbidden-on-TV-and-its-really-hilarious giggle.

I lay motionless, poised to bawl that child out.

At the next giggle, I climbed up the ladder to deliver the stern talking-to and found my son totally, completely asleep. Giggling in his sleep.

It filled me with the most delightful, bubbly, happy feeling. Nothing on earth is better than seeing your children happy, especially when they are happy in their subconscious. I wish I could bottle the feeling of hearing his sleep giggle and take a nice long drink of it on the mornings when everyone’s uncooperative and late for school and its raining but we can’t find the umbrella and I forgot to pack lunch and the stroller’s suddenly missing a wheel. The Sleep Giggle High. Ahhh . .

Older than my years, it appears

We were on line at Bed, Bath and Beyond, returning some household items that didn’t fit our household, and to divert himself, Primo was showing his remarkable strength by lifting things– the pole used to cordon off the line, boxes housing George Foreman grills.

“Holy moly,” I said, “You are so strong! And you’re so young.”

“No,” he replied, “You are just old. You’re elderly.”

He’s not wrong either. I am only 32 and should be in the prime of my youth, but alas I am decrepit in spirit. Nothing that sleeping for two days straight couldn’t fix, though. Yes, 48 hours on uninterrupted sleep would probably even restore my abdomen to its pre-baby-number-2 flatness. After 48 hours of uninterrupted sleep, I would likely remember when to use an apostrophe in “its” and I might even be able to solve the health care crisis. But I guess I’ll never know , , , ,

Eyes Pried Open

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.”

Weird shit is happening . . .

. . . to me at night. And the weirdest part is I suspect that I am the culprit. I went to bed last night with my watch on and woke up this morning with a bare wrist. The watch was under my pillow.

(You can’t see me but as I write this, I am raising my eyebrows, communicating suspicion and consternation). In other words: WTF?

Is someone slipping me AmbienCR without my knowing it? And, in addition to making me remove my wrist jewelry and hide it from myself, are the meds also making me eat while not awake, while you will recall from my prior post is a potential side-effect? If so, that could explain why I never lose weight despite the fact that I honestly don’t seem to eat that much and do the kind of hard, manual labor that would keep Rosanne Barr svelte.

Am I high, or is this really happening?

You know you’re old as dirt when you’re watching Tivo-ed SNL on Monday night at 8pm. And that is precisely what my over-the-hill husband and I were doing last night. About halfway through the show, David faltered with his remote responsibilities, allowing for a slight lag between when the commercials started and when he hit fast-forward. The advertising we saw then totally blew our minds. Blew. Our. Minds.

It was a commercial for AmbienCR and it started innocently enough. “When morning comes in the middle of the night, it affects your entire day.”

Now here was a statement of fact I could relate to. Morning comes in the middle of the night all the time in our household, and when it does, I would have to agree, it throws the whole day into a big ole pile of shit. So, AmbienCR had my full attention.

But just as I was beginning to feel all warm and sleepy and relaxed by the lulling voice of the man praising the many restorative benefits of the sleep aid, things took a strange turn. The voice warned that before you decide to take AmbienCR, there are a few potential side effects you might want to consider.

Like what?

Like, say. sleepwalking, the voice said. Oh, well that’s not too bad, I thought, a little sleepwalking here and there never hurt anyone too terribly much and what a small price to pay for putting morning back in morning’s place.

Oh, and there’s also the slim possibility, the voice continued, that you might be prone to eating or driving while not fully awake with “memory loss for the event.”

“WHAT?” David sputtered, “Did he just say, ‘eating or driving while not fully awake?”

“I think it’s a part of SNL,” I replied, with my usual savvy,

We listened, riveted, as the lulling voice told us that taking AmbienCR might also lead to “abnormal behaviors such as being more outgoing or aggressive than normal . . . and confusion, agitation and hallucinations.”

“Hallucinations?” David exclaimed.

“I feel like I’m hallucinating right now.” I shrieked, “are we HIGH?”

“We are not high, this is REALLY HAPPENING,” David confirmed.

“Wait, wait, I can’t hear him, be quiet!” I said.

Now the lulling voice was on to “swelling of your tongue or throat which may be fatal . . . In patients with depression, worsening of depression, including risk of suicide may occur.”

“HOLY SHIT!!!!” David and I were wide-eyed, disbelieving. Then we began to shriek with laughter, a regular Harold and Kumar on the couch.

“This is INSANE!!!” I yelled, “This has to be a joke,”

Thanks to Tivo, we could settle the matter definitively. We rewound and watched the commercial about four times through before we could certify that it was, in fact, a real commercial.

It’s hard to say which of the long list of potential side effects is more upsetting. Worsening of depression including risk of suicide is hard to beat in terms of awful, irremediable, bottom-of-the-barrel side effects. But I have to say that it really freaks me out to think that a pill could make me DRIVE or EAT while asleep. I’m a bad enough driver and eat enough while fully awake. And then there’s the matter of your tongue potentially swelling up in your throat to fatal proportion. All I have to say is WTF, readers, WTF? Those are some high costs right there for putting morning back in morning’s place.

The most outrageous part of the commercial is the fact that, after detailing these freakish and terrifying side effects, the lulling voice goes on to say, “If you notice any of these, contact your doctor.”

“How the hell can you contact your doctor after you sleep-drive while stuffing your face when you have NO MEMORY OF THE EVENT?????” I shouted to the TV.

David was giggling like a schoolgirl.

Wow. Thanks to Ambien CR for making me feel as though I smoked one down last night, without the actual drugs.

As my darling husband noted: “This is the shit we miss because we don’t watch commercials anymore.”

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.

O frabjous day!

Primo slept for 12 hours last night. Twelve. And this miracle helped me understand something. My boy really needs every minute of those 12 hours of sleep, every night. This is too bad because he won’t get 12 hours of sleep again until the next time he goes to bed at 10:30 pm and wakes before dawn’s first light, which is precisely what happened the night before the 12-hour sleep miracle. He was so under-rested (thanks to an ill-timed late-afternoon car nap) that he was forced to surrender to the siren song of sleep at an unprecedented 6pm the following night.

And surrender he did, like a ton of bricks in the car so that I had to carry him up the three flights of stairs to our apartment. David, my geriatric spouse, threw his back out over the weekend and has been out of commission.

So although Primo comes up to my upper arm, I hoisted his legs on my hips and heaved him up the stairs. By the time I oh-so-gently lay him on his bed, I had to lay there, too, for a good five minutes, wondering if I should call for help. My heart was thundering so wildly it seemed a trip to the ER would be likely. I know, I know, I need to clock more (any) time on the elliptical machine. The point is, a little arrhythmia is a small price to pay for a successful car-to-bed sleeping transfer. And I did it. And he slept 12 hours. And life has never been so good.

Today, my son was an actual member of an angelic order. A wunderkind. A marvel to behold. Case in point.

We were walking down the street when a passerby complimented his striking blue eyes.

“You’re lucky,” I said when she had passed, “Mommy doesn’t have beautiful eyes like you.”

“Oh Mommy,” Primo said, “I like you just the way you are.”

And the hits just kept on coming. He peed without protest. He shared with his sister. He consented to having his hair washed. He walked all the way to Grand Army Plaza and back without a single complaint of wobbly leg syndrome. We lived together in perfect harmony today. Prim and me.

At bedtime, we always talk about our favorite moments of the day, and although these past few weeks, the kid’s been driving me so nuts my favorite moment has often been when he’s zoned out on the couch, watching the Backyardigans, tonight I said, “I had such a great day, Primo, its hard to choose.” To which he replied, “Maybe the whole day was your favorite moment, Mommy.”

Quite right, my son. Quite right.

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?