Bad Dreams & Breakfast

As I've said in the past, sleep is an issue for me. So much so that my great desire for a second child is probably never going to happen because of my fear of sleep deprivation. I was trying a few weeks ago to explain it to a friend. I need about 2 hours to wind down before my body can sleep, and once asleep, if I wake, the process begins again. That would be fine if I rarely woke at night, but I'm a very light sleeper. The slightest noise, vibration, or light will have me awake. Always have been. As a teen my parents gave me the basement of the house as my bedroom when I became too old to share a room with my kid sister. The boiler room was down there. Between the sound of the heater kicking on and off and the settling of the house, I slept an average of maybe 3 hours a night. I remember nights of roaming my parents house. You'd think I'd have the presence of mind back then to simply go to sleep on the couch, but for some reason I never did.

Anyway, back to the present. Kai and I have been home for a week and a half during the holidays. During a regular week we get home by 6:00, eat dinner, relax for half and hour or so, then get ready for bed, read books and I pack him off to sleep by the latest 9:00 so I can hopefully begin my own wind down by 10:00, falling to sleep if I'm lucky by 11:00 and hopefully not wake up till 6:00 when he gets in to my bed to nurse. I sleep in a pitch black room with ear plugs or white noise running in the background. Anything else and I'm doomed. Now that we're home for a while our sleep habits have gotten lax, so last night, realizing that work and school were beginning again in a few days and we needed to get back on schedule, I got him to bed by 8:00 (after wearing him out with a trip to the city and a roam around Chinatown), and got myself to sleep by 11:00. Woo Hoo! Good job!

Right.

At 12:30 am, someone from Chandler AZ (whomever it is at work who has my personal cell programmed in to your phone, I will find you! you must pay!) paged my cell phone which was plugged in and charging on my night stand. The thing was set to vibrate. This tiny vibration coming from my night stand every 5 minutes to let me know that I had a text message on my cell phone transformed itself in to the most disturbing dream I've had in years. I dreamt that there were leeches in my bed, only my blanket was the floor and the leeches were crawling all over everything. When I went to inspect where the leeches had come from, I found a huge, grotesquely mutated, silver fish with a gaping mouth in my salt water fish tank, one by one attacking and killing my fish and piling them in a small cup. My poor clown and puffer fish were lying limp over the side of the cup while the demon silver gulping fish banged it's head on the glass every 5 minutes or so. So I asked someone about it (don't remember who) and it seems that the fish had been put in an old planter pot where mosquitoes had been breeding, so in actuality the fish and the red leeches that were crawling all over everything were the mutated babies of the fish and the mosquito larvae. Makes perfect sense to me!

All of this from the teeny weeny little vibration coming from my end table because someone from Chandler AZ accidentally paged me on my cell phone somewhere in the middle of the night while probably out at a party or a bar or something horrendously fun that I don't do. AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! Needless to say, I was half awake, half asleep all night, semi-conscious of what was going on but desperately trying not to come in to full wakefulness knowing that if I did it would be 2 hours before I could possibly entertain sleeping again only to be woken up a half and hour later by the lactose vampire, so I slept, dreaming about crawling leeches, gulping mutated silver fish, and breeding mosquito larvae.

At 6:00 am like clockwork the vampire staggers blindly in to my room like a mole, attached himself to me, nursed for half and hour, put on the TV, then left to roam the house. I rolled over and went back to sleep having finally turned off the phone.

At 9:30 am I got out of bed. This is where it gets funny.

Kai has been making his own breakfast for a year now. It's not too hard. He opens the fridge, grabs a yo-baby drink, brings it to me to open, then pours himself some cheerios with milk, or grabs a yogurt and a roll. He's easy and I never actually taught him any of this. He's just Mr. independence and refuses to wait for me for anything which in the instance of breakfast is bliss, but not always. Anyway I digress. Lately though his palate has been broadening again. As I've said over and over again, he's a garbage disposal. You never see him unless he's got 2 hands full of something heading for his mouth. He'll try any food, and even if he doesn't like it, will try it a second time to be sure. He loves flavors and experimentation with food. It's actually pretty cool. He's a hell of a lot braver than I am when it comes to eating.

This morning I get out of bed to find an experiment in the making. Kai is sitting up on the barstool next to the counter. He's got a bowl full of breakfast rolls (about 5 or 6 of them actually all packed in to the bowl), a hard boiled egg, peeled, shells neatly piled to the side on the counter. He's holding a HUGE jar of Romano cheese, about to pour it all over the rolls and egg. I walk in just as he's about to start pouring. He stops, cheese bottle mid-air, looks at me and says, "I like stinky cheese Mama! I want to see what it tastes like!" To which I quickly grabbed 4 of the 5 rolls, popped them back in to the bag, and helped him pour without dumping the entire content of the bottle all over the counter, then went to make my tea, all the while gagging privately as I watched him out of the corner of my eye happily eat his egg, rolling it around in the Romano, and squish it inside the roll. Oh it was so disgusting but hey, nutritious right? He'd even gone so far as to pour himself a cup of milk so how was I to argue. He sat there MMMing and making all sorts of yummy noises.

Ah well. At least someone got something out of that misplaced call in the middle of the night.

Bill Maher aime les Français

A Sudden Passion for Tighty Whiteys

OK. Through out my dating life I've always had that initial, "Ewwww" if ever I saw a guy in tighty whiteys. I mean come on! What are they about? I could not for the life of me comprehend why a man would wear such horrendously unsexy repellant underpants, and shiver when the bleating response came back at me, "but they're comfortable!"

I have now fallen in love with the image of a scampering little tushy in tighty whiteys. Kai has been running around the house all day in just his underpants. No Sponge Bob today. No Spider Man or Shrek. Just plain old tighty whiteys and oh my! He's just so cute! His tushy looks so teeny and bright with his skinny little legs and belly popping out over the waist band, underpants drooping in the back. Sigh. It's sort of like having the old 1960's Pillsbury Dough Boy in my house, only cuter. Oh my!

The Story of Stuff

Twisted Little Control Issue

I just got Kai in to bed, his own bed, at a reasonable hour, for the first time in over a week. Probably closer to 3 weeks to be honest. While we've been sick he's found his way back to my bed. I even reinstalled the bed rail on "his" side of the bed after he almost threw himself off the bed in a fevered delusion the other night.

I'm getting off track.

Now that he's sick and I'm not, he's focused on a particular little control issue to flex his 3 year old muscles over Mama. He won't wipe his own nose. I'm not saying that he's refusing to have his nose wiped. NOOOO!!!! His nose is running like a faucet. Long yellow, gooey masses of disgusting mucous every 2 minutes or so pouring out of his face for 3 days. His issue isn't that he doesn't want his nose wiped. On the contrary. He's following me around with a box of tissues wailing, "Mama! Boogies!" I can have my hands full, and he's refusing to wipe his own nose. I could be on the toilet and he won't wipe his own nose. He'll hand me to box of tissues and go, "Nooooo Mama! I want you to do it!" 3 days, every 2 minutes or so, and we haven't seen the outside of this apartment in 3 weeks. Does anyone want a little boy? At one point I couldn't drop what I was doing to wipe it for him and he had to wait a minute or two for me while I sat there trying to reason with him from the other room asking him why he couldn't just wipe his own nose just this once. By the time I got to him his face was covered. It was just beyond disgusting. It's not that he can't wipe his own nose. He's been doing that for a year and a half now. He can even blow his own darn nose. Somewhere in the past 2 days he decided that, as he puts it, it's my "job". "Mama. You doooo it. It's Yooooure joooobbb!"

I think I'm going to be thankful when I get to go back to work at this point. I'm going to get to my office, cling to my desk, and kiss my keyboard next week.