Saturday, March 5, 2011

Past Deadline: Yes I Am Preoccupied with This

I have good news and bad news.

The good news is I think I solved the mystery of why a fax machine in Utah is calling us in the middle of the night on our home phone number. Somehow, during one of those middle-of-the-night calls, I managed to fumble with phone in just the right way to trigger my own fax machine to wake up and connect. We actually received a fax!

The fax revealed some wacky company was trying to send information to a business in our area. I telephoned the local business and it turns out their fax number is remarkably close to our home phone number. I pleaded my case and they must have called the client service number on the fax to change the number because the calls have stopped. Thank you, local business!

The bad news? Despite the absence of Utah, this week has probably ranked as the Worst Week Ever on the sleep front.

Okay. I KNOW I dwell on this a lot, but I am seriously preoccupied by burny eyes and a slightly doomed feeling. I am convinced that a lot of the world’s problems would be solved if people would just get more sleep. Everything seems that much more difficult when one is tired.

The week started off well enough. I dealt with Utah on Monday. Girlchild was at home from school, afflicted with The Cold with The Cough (alternately referred to as the plague). She seemed to be coming along nicely, though.

Ha! Silly me.

That night Girlchild was up two or three times because of her cough and Boychild chimed in with his own woes – a sore tummy and a nagging (and I do mean nagging) inability to go back to sleep. Eventually I reached that annoying point when I had been awakened too many times and couldn’t fall back to sleep. Despite the fact I could have been up vacuuming or writing a novel or choreographing Broadway musicals, I opted to toss and turn and Think Deep Thoughts in the Dark.

The two hours of sleep I got (Groom-boy got about the same) translated into having basically no fuse for anything and feeling a bit like crying over nothing. Fortunately the risk of violence against random strangers or of sobbing in public was diminished by the fact I was stuck at home with not one, but two sick kids. (My mom spelled me off for half an hour so I could buy cat food, but there were no ugly incidents to report.)

On Tuesday night I went to bed early. Just as I dozed off, Boychild woke me up. Twice. I started to feel panicky. Would I ever sleep again? Are they trying to kill me? Everything settled down, though, and I got a glorious (and unheard of) seven hours of sleep! I felt like a new person!

On Wednesday Girlchild made it back to school, but Boychild was still under the weather. And I mention weather here because that was the calm before the storm.

One word: earache.

Girlchild began to complain of this affliction Wednesday night. In short, it was one heck of a long night that involved rotating shifts of people comforting a very miserable little girl.

Then Boychild started coughing.

Then Buster started yowling.

I expected Utah to call, but we’d fixed their wagon already.

The only good thing is that I was prepared for a bad night and had no expectations. Still, when I woke up in the morning after two or three hours of intermittent dozing, I seriously began to question things. For example, what is my name? What day is it? And who are the crazy people in this house?

I don’t think I’ve felt this tired since the newborn days.

Do any of you remember when it was fun to pull all nighters and you’d do it on purpose? You’d slug back the caffeine to finish a paper or party with friends or lie awake in defiance of parents just to see what “all night” looked like?

Ha. Been there and done that, thanks. I have seen “all night” and it is just plain dark. Night is good for sleeping.

Please.

If you don’t mind.
Published in The Perth Courier, Feb. 24/11

No comments: