Healthier boys, better night

So, last night the Beautiful Wife decided that she wanted to work with Firstborn on his homework, and sent me off to get Secondborn to sleep. Admittedly, for the previous two nights she'd had to give Secondborn breathing treatments for this horrible cough of his, but apparently that wasn't why she wanted to trade bedtime duties. Apparently she really wanted to help Firstborn work on his homework. Which, you know, I don't understand at all, but whatever.

So, after a bit of negotiating, I got Secondborn to go to sleep. I managed this without using a breathing treatment, though that's more because he's getting better than it is any sort of tribute to my parenting skills. Unfortunately, part of the deal involved me stretching out on the bed with him.(Secondborn, despite his limited vocabulary, is a remarkably talented haggler.) This, to the great surprise of absolutely nobody, meant that I quickly passed out on my son's bed, and stayed there for... I don't know, maybe half an hour? Forty-five minutes?

Then he started coughing again, though not as badly as before. So I set up some pillows and arranged the boy so that he was sleeping upright (kind of like he was sitting in a car seat, but just leaning back against a pillow). That seemed to solve the problem. Unfortunately, it also meant that I couldn't go back to sleep.

So I got up, played a little bit of Bulletstorm (which is exactly the kind of game it sounds like), then read for a while, and finally went back to bed. (Where I slept like a rock, though I was a little annoyed that Patrick Swayze didn't want me to play on his volleyball team. Apparently it was my night for dreaming about being left out of things by the Cool Kids?)

...Anyway, somewhere in there I came up with a solution for a problem I'd run into on the Afterworld project. The problem was, basically, that I'd ripped out my opening scene and replaced it with something different. The new scene is, I think, stronger than the original scene, but the change creates some logistical problems: I need the main character to do a certain sort of planning, and that sort of planning doesn't make sense as a direct response to the new scene.

But, as I was lying in bed waiting for Morpheus to drop by with his bag of sand, I came up with a solution. A good, solid, workable solution. And, even better, I still remembered it when I woke up this morning. So I have a plan, and the writing can continue.

So, all in all, I'm going to call this a victory.