Sleep

I don't know if the fucking of our clocks that is DST is continuing, if Charlie has tripped too much acid at preschool (see below) or if she is secretly in training for special ops and is practicing sleep deprivation to see how she functions...but Charlie has recently decided that sleeping in her own bed is a path straight to hell.  So this mean she now joins us.  In bed.  Every night.

Not cool.

The fuck?  What are they doing in preschool nowadays?

I am not sure if out of my  9 10 readers (Hi, Mason!) there is anyone who practices attachment parenting.  If you are one, you might want to stop reading.  Or continue reading so you can judge me on my parenting practices.  Really, I'm cool either way.  I am not one of those parents.  Mostly because of the fact that I need my sleep.  And you don't get much when you have a child in bed with you.

As I have learned the past few weeks.

Charlie is practicing her cage fighting she had perfected in the womb in her sleep.  In my bed.  On me.  I go to bed with visions of waking in the morning well rested.  I wake instead with a lovely pattern of bruises up my left side because she has beat the shit out of me in her sleep.  She also tends to make this high pitched whining noise that is surely to summon the hounds of hell to come and steal my soul.  Or for Alexis to come climb into bed with us as well, which has happened a few times.  Poor deprived middle child; she never got to sleep with me.  Of course, she also would yell from her bed for me to come get her out of it until she was well over four....completely different animal there, Alexis is.  Elizabeth also used to like to sleep with me, but she didn't beat on me.  She just wanted to sleep "on your chest, Mommy" and would then jam my chin up to an unnatural angle as she snuggled in.  With her, I spent half the night going from my twin bed to the trundle she slept in under it; lather, rinse, and repeat.

We currently have a California King bed.  One would not think that a 40 lb child could take up so much room in it.  She usually has about 3/4 of the bed.  Then when Alexis comes in, she takes up about another third of the bed.  I'm pretty sure that is over a whole bed, but I'm too sleep deprived to figure it up.

I don't function well in the mornings.  One thing Charles learned quickly about me, aside from the whole laundry thing and my general insanity, was that I need sleep.  I am not blessed, like some of my siblings, with the ability to get by on just 5 hours.  I need a good 8-9 hours, and that is when I am not depressed.  I am pretty sure that I am non-functional enough in the mornings that if I ever had to sign an important contract first thing, I could get out of it if I want to by some kind of insanity plea.

So waking up every morning, feeling as though I have done battle throughout the night?  Yeah, it's made life super fun lately.  So much that the above picture actually kinda makes sense to me.

The logical answer to this?  Leave a pillow and a blanket and she can sleep on the floor, right?  Yeah.  It took me two weeks to think of this.  My initial thought was to try to invent injectable coffee.  Then I realized there was another name for this.  Cocaine.

I think I need to add money for when Mommy was sleep deprived to the kids' therapy funds.

DST

Of all of the myriad of ways that have been developed to torture parents, Daylight Savings Time has to be the worst.

I mean, that is not really a big revelation to anyone who has, works with, or knows someone with children.  Seriously, who thinks of this shit?  Let's go for 6 months on one time schedule, and then suddenly decide to move time back or forth an hour, and then pretend that life is going to go on like normal.  When in reality, you just slapped society with the equivalent of a toddler who has been given a bottle of vodka with coke and heroin mixed into it.

And let's not talk about the effects on the children...

All of that bullshit that the nebulous "they" talk about regarding sleep hygiene, bedtime routines, and basically taking enough Xanax to get through bath time...all of that goes flying out the window twice a year.  We are fucking with children's internal clocks here, people.  There is no other explanation than the fact that someone, somewhere, wants to punish you for having sex and having procreated.

I am actually starting to wonder about the timing of elections and DST.  Again, the nebulous "they" seem to have an agenda for world domination going on here.  Mind control through sleep deprivation, doncha know?

I'd be concerned about my apparent increasing paranoia, but I am too busy mourning the loss of the sun while I eat my dinner and attempt to wrangle confused children into bed at what society says is the appropriate hour, but what their bodies are rebelling against in a more fierce fashion than Simon Cowell rebels against country music and owls.

Which are, coincidentally, nocturnal.  SEE WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT HERE???