Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Sometimes you just wanna break!

I cannot emphasize enough how excited I am to be going to Lake Tahoe in a couple of weeks.  Of course, it could be a hotel room in Fresno or a tent in the woods for all I care, so long as I get away from my life for a few days. 

My kids are making me nuts.  I don't know how those homesteader women survived--out there all alone day after day, with their children every waking and sleeping moment and no adults to talk to.  I tell ya, its no wonder that beating children was more common back then! ;) J/K (mostly, anyway).  If I ignore Keilana for a mere five minutes (to, oh, let's say write a blog), she has a melt down.  So its been rather difficult to get just basic household chores done, since I hate some of them anyway and listening to an almost-four-year-old scream the whole  time makes them so much more unpleasant.  Dylan has learned four or five new words in the last couple of days, so he finally seems to be picking up language quickly now, and yet he has taken to grunting constantly, "Uh, uh, uh, uh" and pointing all day long.  Its so annoying!!!  

Yesterday, he refused to take a nap.  Then last night at about six, while I was trying to eat my dinner, he grabbed a blanket, crawled up on my lap and fell asleep in about two minutes.  He didn't seem much interested in waking up, so I made the mistake of just letting him go to bed.  He rose bright eyed and bushy tailed at 3am.  He allowed me to get away with putting in Bob the Builder and then Cars, rather than play with him, but he would get mad and scream if I went upstairs.  So I got very little sleep--especially since until 3am, Keilana was in our bed.  

She has been getting in our bed every single night for the last several months.  She's also started insisting that she have the door open and the hallway light on when she's in her own bedroom.  This wouldn't be such a big deal, except she is and has always been a very busy and restless sleeper.  She moves constantly, wakes up a lot and tries to sleep sideways (and she's getting tall enough--45" and counting!--that even in a king sized bed that's becoming a problem).

So its been weeks since I've had a decent, uninterrupted night of sleep.  Of course, again that wouldn't be so bad except that napping is nearly impossible (at the very least dangerous)  with my oldest monkey unsupervised in the house while I sleep.  That wouldn't even be so bad, as I've had times in my life where I have been far more sleep-deprived (for example, nearly all of high school), but I'm afraid that I'm to that point where I'm so sleepy that if I close my eyes I get dizzy.  But I've discovered I kinda like that feeling--all floaty and weightless.  Makes me empathize a bit more with people who like to get high.  I'm always worried that if I do it too long I will pass out and fall over on the floor, though.  

If I had nothing to do but tend to my currently overly-ignored children, this would all be quite tolerable and non-problematic.  Unfortunately, my husband is gone all the time, I have a job, a fairly major calling I need to stay on top of, and I really ought to get my visiting teaching done soon (since I have 3 inactive sisters and one who also has a husband who's often MIA and four children, one of them a very-high demand autistic daughter, getting it done is a little important).

And its not just kids.  I've been sick a lot lately, making the fatigue and sleepiness that much more annoying, being interspersed with frequent headaches.  That makes everything else seem much more taxing that it should.  And sometimes the people we love just make us a little nuts and we need a break from them.  I am so grateful that I will have four days away from everything, where I won't really have to think about my calling, my kids, my friends, my job, Doug's job, his calling, either of our families (we love them, I think we'd just prefer not to talk about them for a while) and all of the 9,000 other things it feels like we're juggling right now.  Actually, one day would probably due, but I'll take four!  I know I'm a little spoiled, but I've decided I'm okay with that.

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