Payback Week

So, Adam is out of town, and karma or something is repaying me for all of the times I left him alone with the kids.

Yesterday morning, Gus, who has a cold, woke up at 3 AM. He was so congested, he was having a hard time breathing easily. I spent two hours in the rocking chair trying to get him back to sleep. Every 15 minutes or so, he’d ask me to let him down, turn on the light, read a book, etc. After I said no each time, “it’s time for sleeping”, a while later, he would reach up and find my face, and say, “kiss mommy”, and then give me a nice big kiss on the face (an extremely moist kiss, as you might imagine).  At no point did he go back to sleep, at 5 AM I finally gave up and we went downstairs and watched Sesame Street.

Yesterday I made it through the day, after all, it wasn’t any worse than taking the redeye. Last night, I had a babysitter put the boys to bed, and went to an inaugural party at a friend’s house. (But I was still home and in bed by 9:30, given the 3 AM wake-up!)

At midnight last night, a few hours after I had fallen asleep, I hear Gus, saying, “Kitty…kitty, where are you?” in a sing-song voice. He keeps saying this for a while, and I figure kitty has fallen out of his crib or something. But when I go in, I realize the babysitter forgot to put his kitty in his crib with him. I then have to spend 5 minutes searching the house to find an extra kitty to put in the crib with Gus. With kitty in hand, Gus falls back asleep.

 So then I go back to bed.

 At 3 AM, I hear the cats yowling in the dining room, and scrabbling on the door. I get up, with the intention of locking them in the basement (every few weeks, they just get all crazy at night). As I walk into the dining room and look at the back door (a sliding glass door), and there are two huge raccoons. They are both scrabbling at the bottom of our back door as if they are going to dig a hole through into the house. Sadly, I was so tired and disoriented that I failed to take a picture. They did not appear phased AT ALL by my presence, and I came right up to the window and knocked on it before they moved away.

Back to bed again. And right back up again at 5:50 AM, when Gus wakes up for the day.