Dragging myself forward by my eyelids, today

After I prudently decided not to start watching an episode of Dr. Who at 9:57 p.m. last night, I buttoned up the house and climbed into bed by a respectable (and even early, by our sick, sick standards) 10:30 p.m., only to wake at 12:05 a.m. with the same stuffy nose I’ve had for five days and the all-over-body-aches that have been the hallmark of any viral infection I get since the Guillain-Barré. And then was woken by Piper clambering into bed at 4:07 a.m., who stage-whispered to me that she “just wanted to snuggle,” that Carlos the cat “is licking my elbow!” and that “the bed is very full.” Points for accuracy in observation, kid, but let’s discuss cause and effect, what?

We’ve managed to avoid doing much in-bed co-sleeping thus far, which means that none of us are particularly good at it. Kate managed to stay asleep; I couldn’t drop back off with our four-year-old heater elbowing me and scooting around, so around 4:47 I declared enough was enough, told my protesting lumbar region to stuff it, and forklifted a protesting Piper back to her own bed, where we had a brief conversation about bad dreams and how to recover from them. “My bad dreams,” Piper told me at one point, “are all wasted.” I asked what that meant and didn’t get anything coherent back, so I chalked it up to inadvertent kid-poetry.

Unwisely, I hit snooze twice when the alarm went off at 6:45, which meant the entire morning sequence started late and had to be done quicker than usual. (Such is the reward for such seemingly attractive short-term mercies: a lesson I experience often but cannot seem to hold onto.) Both kids were ravenous before I got leftover oatmeal and eggs on the table, I answered a FaceTime call in my underwear (fortunately my in-laws have seen this before and gracefully withheld comment), and found myself effectively face down in my morning cup of tea while feeding Sydney the spoonfuls of peanut butter she was requesting with increasingly intent “more” signs, as she’d demolished two eggs and both her own and some of everyone else’s oatmeal already.

If Kate or I ever go missing, burp Syd and see if you hear us yelling.

Anyhow, despite a stiff cup of coffee, my brain still feels like it’s firing only on half its cylinders.