Sporting Shorts - Action Shot, alexis225 via flickr

“Mommy!!”

I had went back to bed, or really never got out of bed even if I woke up. So, I had been (re)snoozing for an hour and a half. I was counting on two hours.

“Mommy!” I listen, still not opening my eyes. I hear sniffles.

“Mooooooommmmy! It hurts!” I open my eyes, which feels quick but it must be very slow. I raise my drowsy eyelids and look at the clock. 6:00am. The thing I hate most about my husband riding his bike to work is that he has to get up at 4:00am. Even if I make his lunch the night before, my sleep is still interrupted. I haven’t had one full night of sleep since before I was pregnant for Levi. Even the one two-day get-away I had, when my thyroid was nuked, was full of tossing nights.

“Moommy!” Finally, I throw the covers off and go tend to Levi. The pediatrician explained that boys, often, get irritated on their penis during whole potty training stage. So, that’s another thing we’ve been dealing with periodically. This irritation, this sore, gets aggravated when his ammonia filled pee (sans infection, we’ve tested) emits itself during his sleep.

Which, for the past week, has been every night. Morning rather. You know, right before you’re going to wake up.

That’s how the day started. When my sleep is interrupted, quickly, abruptly, I don’t get a good foot off. It tends to be rather … annoying. Mid-morning, I finally made the connection between my snarkiness and the rude awakening.

That’s one thing I miss about staying at home. Days were never bad. Days were never this persnickety. Sure, we’d have days we couldn’t get things done. We’d have days where we were ornery, but we didn’t have the workday bad days. We didn’t have cases of the Mondays.

Now life is filled with a new layer of expectations, outcomes, and things that can or cannot get done. The activities I was involved in while not working where largely of my own doing. I volunteered for things I wanted to be a part of. Now, I work for an organization that I want to be a part of, but sometimes work can assign tasks you wouldn’t otherwise volunteer to do. When you volunteer, you choose, easier, the shifts you work, which makes your environment more selective. I could choose, for example, to never volunteer during nap time. Now, I work a 40 hour week, and we don’t live in a country fond of the Siesta.

With these new expectations, I find that I no longer have the fluidity to move with those unexpected things, mood swings, that I previously had. I could, for example, cancel a play date if our day just wasn’t adding up. I can’t cancel work because moods don’t jive. I knew this day was coming. I knew getting out the door was a challenge, and I was eager to see how it would look once employed, regularly. Levi loves school, so this change is definitely for the better.

I better get to bed. I know what morning will likely bring. 4am interruption followed by a wet bed between 6am and 7am. There is no point denying the inevitable, so I might as well plan.

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