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Is it wrong to look down at the angelic face of your sleeping child and mutter “Dammit, dammit, dammit”?
I mean, I can explain. Really.
I saw her sleeping with her mouth slightly open and a thin trail of drool tracing her lower jawline while driving her back home after a long…LONG weekend of travel and fun and more travel and fun and extremely early risings and extremely late bedtimes and more travel.
In fact, this morning I roused the family out of the hotel beds just before 3:00 AM Eastern (2:00 AM Central). Forty minutes of quick packing and showering and other last minute preparations saw us out the door and on the highway. My daughter was up the whole way to the airport,babbling along in the back. She doggedly clung to consciousness during the bus ride from the car rental place and in the lines in the airport. She was pliable, but aware.
There was a brief forty minutes or so of sleep on the plane itself, but she roused herself sometime around the midway point and made her presence known to the other passengers.
Hanging out in Baggage Claim only seemed to invigorate her, and soon enough she was running up and down the hallways while I waited for our bags. She was very excited by the bus ride to the car.
One more stop at her aunt and uncle’s house to pick up our other car seemed to seal the deal. She wasn’t entirely awake…she looked tired…but she was functional. Functional enough to get us back to our home and hopefully a late morning nap that we all could participate in and enjoy.
10 minutes after we left for our own home, I glanced back in the rearview mirror after hearing some suspicious deep breathing. Sure enough, she was asleep. She slept the whole way home.
The calculus of toddlers is tricky my friends. Naps must be taken at just the right moment or not at all if you think to have any kind of a chance. She took her nap too early, and stayed asleep too long. My wife and I, much less able to bounce back from sleep deprivation due to her pregnancy and neither of us being teenagers anymore, were royally screwed.
Hence the vigorous “Dammit, Dammit, Dammit” on beholding my little angel, my love and reason for being, asleep in her car seat on the ride home.
I’m so tired right now that I can barely keep the words on this screen straight. Everything keeps crossing back and forth.
I think I’ll write more later.
