The Dark Side of Parenting... Again...

For reasons that I don't pretend to understand, my body decided that I should wake up on Sunday morning at, I don't know, roughly three in the morning. And, having done that, it also decided that it shouldn't be at all willing to go back to sleep. So I sat up and read, and eventually Firstborn woke up. So I made him a waffle, and I read some more. And finally Secondborn woke up, so I got him a couple of muffins, and then I read some more.

Then my alarm went off, so I showered and dressed and got the boys ready for church, and off we went. Firstborn attended the service, Secondborn played in the nursery, and I sat in the kitchen and read some more. And typed a little, after I finished the book.

After church: the Dallas World Aquarium. From which, if I can manage it, I'll put up some pictures later. The DWA is awesome. It's got all sorts of fun things to see... and I keep finding things I hadn't seen before. Also, it's just about exactly the right length. If you start at the top, and follow the winding path down and around and down some more and around some more, and step outside for a moment to see the penguins, and step back inside and go through the glass tunnel under the sharks, and come back up and see the jaguar, then you reach the end of the path at just about exactly the point when two small boys have been overwhelmed with a surfeit of fish and reptiles and amphibians and snakes and giant frikkin' alligators and manatees. And then you leave.

At which point, in our case, meant heading back to my parents' house for a bit of rest, and then dinner. And believe me, by that point I'd been awake long enough that rest was sounding like a very good idea indeed. So I got about a forty-five minute coma nap, and then we had dinner.

And then we went home and put the boys to bed. Well, I say that. Secondborn tried out a game of Memory with his mother, the Beautiful Woman. He isn't quite three years old yet, and he was very tired, so that didn't last very long. Beautiful Wife stretched out with him on the bed, and soon after that... well, let's just say that I'm not entirely sure who was snoring louder.

Firstborn, meanwhile, had engaged me in a game of Battleship. I won the first game; he won the second one. Which, given that this was third time in his life that he'd ever played the game, I thought was pretty good. After the second game, he put his head on the pillow, closed his eyes, and fell asleep - in fact, he may actually have fallen asleep before he quite finished closing his eyes. Anyway, it was fast.

And it was just in time for Secondborn to wake himself back up by coughing, and then by being noisily sick. This made him upset, which made him scream, which... well, sick and tired small boys do not appreciate it when you dump them precipitously into the shower.

This, unfortunately, did not solve the problem. So here I am, at Dear Ye Immortal Gods It's Almost Midnight, and I'm still awake. And I have to work tomorrow; did I mention that? And I'm pretty darned sure I've passed my window, which means that sleep no longer wants anything to do with me.

This... this exactly... is what parents mean when we talk about the joys of parenting.