Parenting is all about the Little Disasters

Let me tell you how my morning is going:

1. I've slept on the floor in Secondborn's room for two nights straight. I do this because if I don't, there's a seventy percent chance on any given night that the boy will wake up at two o'clock in the morning and attempt to come and sleep atop his mother. If I'm in the room with him, he doesn't do this. If I try to sleep in his bed, he sleeps on top of me... and I don't sleep so well with toes in my eyes or elbows in my ears (or, on one memorable occasion, both).

So: me, on the floor, "sleeping".

2. Unlike my preferred under-the-covers-in-a-real-bed arrangement, being on the floor in Secondborn's room puts me in the perfect position to hear everything that goes on in the house. Someone brushing their teeth, for example. Or running a bath. Or clunking dishes and cabinets in the kitchen. It doesn't matter how quiet they try to be; I'm ten feet away through an open doorway. There is no ignoring it.

This probably explains how I came to be dreaming that I was visiting my Supposed Former Wife at a very, very strange military base. (There was a bar created entirely for oriental personnel. It served sake. Also, the windows on our quarters were blacked out, and we had turn out all our lights when the rest of the base did -- it was like nobody was supposed to know we were there, even though we were walking around the base normally during the day.)

So: when I was sleeping, weird and slightly disturbing dreams.

3. Firstborn woke up approximately two hours before Secondborn did, and therefore woke me up approximately two hours before I wanted to. I sent him off to watch videos in his room. He woke me up again. I sent him off to watch different videos on my Kindle Fire in the back room. He woke me up again to explain that he needed to use my computer instead. I sent him off to do so. He woke me up again: "Daddy, I have news! I've learned all the controls on--" "I don't need news, I need sleep."

Then Secondborn woke up.

So: no more sleep.

4. Every parent has a list of inviolable rules that they would never have come up with if they didn't A) have kids, and B) have the particular kids that share their household. This morning's example is this: Never Keep Paint In The Kitchen Pantry. This morning, you see...

No. You know what? I can't even bring myself to describe it. I'm just going to leave it to you to envision what might have happened.

So: me, instead of making breakfast, performing a massive, messy cleanup on a massive, messy mess.

Yeah.

5. It's now ten o'clock in the morning, and nobody -- including me -- has had breakfast yet.

So: hungry. So, so hungry.

We're... going out to breakfast. Now.