Sleep Deprivation, Preschool, Street Sweeping, and Malaria

We don't get much sleep around here. No one with a newborn does, to be sure. But I've mentioned before that because of Emma's reflux we get a little less than the average bears. She typically cries from about 7:30-9:00, and throughout the night she wakes up to nurse more frequently (because her tender tummy can't handle much at a time), and once or twice a night has fussy bouts after a feeding. So I'm rocking and rolling each day on about three cumulative hours of very fragmented sleep. And I can't "sleep when the baby sleeps" during the day on account of the Energizer Bunny. So I'm tired. Very very tired. As this is not my first rodeo, I expect the challenge, I know that it's temporary, and compared to Ben's colic this is a cinch. So I plow through. But this week it's catching up with me. You'd think my friend's passing would be the straw that broke the camel's back, but it wasn't. It was the front yard.

Background: For some reason it did not occur to me that while I was not going back to school until November, Ben starts school in two weeks. I'd finally become okay with the fact that we've sat around the house for the entire summer, because in my head we still had two more months to play. Now my two months has become two weeks, and I want to finally get some enjoyment out of my time at home with my kiddo. Emma's still tiny, and because she's a ticking time bomb of puke and scream potential, adventures are a 50/50 crap-shoot. Maybe she'll be great, maybe she'll wail and barf all over the place. We've experienced both so far on outings. But I still want to try. Plus there's that whole "fresh air" thing for me, and Ben's insatiable need to run and play and be a three-year-old boy. Bottom line: we need to get out of the house and do some summer.

Also: Today is street sweeping day. For starters, I think street sweeping is more futile than making your bed. All you're doing is pushing leaves from the gutter to the middle of the street. But Orange County insists on sweeping its streets. In our neighborhood, it means enough stress to put you in therapy. You can't park on either side of the street for four hours. You also can't park in the alley behind the houses. Sure, we each have a one-car garage that could fit a vespa (maybe), and each "quad" shares four parking spots (for eight units). So...if you do the math...you will quickly see that unless you have a compact vespa and nothing else to store in your garage, there is no where to put your car. So you either need to not be home from 11:30-3:30 or get real competitive with the neighbors for those four spots in the alley. I can't leave from 11:30-3:30 because of nap time, so my only recourse is to stare at the alley spots all morning and quickly take one as soon as someone leaves. Kind of like those people that follow you to your car in the Costco parking lot, then idle directly behind you so no one will slip in front of them, then zoom into the spot. Yeah...I do that on Wednesdays.

Finally: We live in a duplex type of home, and we share a central "quad" outside with our place and the one next door. This is the only "yard" or outdoor play area that we have to speak of (besides a tiny little back deck where Ben does his painting, and where we stored a baby blow-up pool filled with rain water and probably an entire ecosystem for upwards of a year). It's always been fine, and even great when Ben's best friends lived next door. All summer the sprinklers have been timed to come on at 7:00am. This seems a bit insane to me since it doesn't heat up until about five hours later, which means the grass just sits there as mud and the pavement becomes a dangerous slip-and-slide. All morning. Because I've primarily spent this summer indoors and our friends moved, we haven't really played outside much for a few months.


This story is getting long. Sorry for the Great Expectations-style of narrative. Hang in there--the forty chapters of build-up are giving way to the grand finale.

So this morning I found myself wanting to get out and do something. But since it's street sweeping day, I didn't want to risk leaving and coming home to no parking spot and, subsequently, a parking ticket. But then my big idea came--something I'd been picturing in my mind since getting pregnant. I had this dreamy image of Ben splashing in the little kiddie pool on the grass while I lounged with Emma on a blanket nearby, idyllically gazing into her eyes and maybe sipping some iced tea. Doesn't that sound lovely? So today would be the day. When Emma woke up from her nap, I fed her then blew up the pool while Ben cleaned up his trains. I brought the pool downstairs, started the hose, then went back inside to put Emma in a sweet little sundress and help Ben get into his swim clothes. I grabbed a blanket, towel, camera, and Emma, and Ben grabbed his diving toys. We went out on the grass. Here's where things got dicey. Because of the incessant early morning over-watering, the grass area was disgusting. It was super muddy and swarming with bees, water-bugs, and mosquitoes. I felt like just standing near it I would get malaria. Sadly I pulled Ben out of the pool (he'd already dived in) and dragged him back inside. He was wailing, Emma was wailing, and I wanted to be wailing. Once we got inside, for some reason I became acutely aware of how gross and messy the house was. And that's when I got that creeping feeling of overwhelm. One kid crying, naked because if he couldn't wear his wet swimsuit he wouldn't wear anything at all; one baby crying because she'd had the hiccups for 20 minutes and puking was imminent; and one mama, way too tired to deal.

Sigh. Maybe tomorrow we'll go to the mall.