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Best Shot Monday

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Kyle: “Wun-fee-fibe-nigh…TEN! (claps hands) ‘Ray!! Bwass-awv!

Jacqui: “No, Kyle. Dat’s how you don’t do dat. Like dis: “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one… blast off! Like dat. Try ‘gain.”

Kyle: “Wun-fee-fibe-sebin-TEN-BWASS-AWWWV! DEEEE-ENNNNN! Gackie shush!

Jacqui: “Kyle, don’t tell me to shush. Dat’s not polite and you’ll make Emily sad. I’m jess tryin’ ta help you not count all wrong. Count downs start wif ten, not one. An’ you missed a whole buncha numbers. You bedder start over… Ten, nine…

Kyle: “Wunfeeseben…TEN! Bwass-AWWWV! (Tucking chin and glaring) AWWW DUNNN GACKIE!!

Jacqui: “Crabby boy. Summday you’ll wish ya lissend to me. Don’t ebber say I din’t try ta tell ya.”

Kyle: “THHHHBBBBBBBT!!!”

Jacqui: (looking to me with an appalled gasp) Well you know Mom, he’s not goin’ ta be very pop-lar in play groups wif dis sorta nonsense. Emily will be soooooo disda-poin-ed!

And so my day starts… with a smile in my heart for my silly, funny little kiddos. Each of them a blessing.

If you’re new here and wondering what Jacqui was talking about with regards to Emily, click here.

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Little Mister Kyle turns two this week… and it’s already going a little too fast.

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Image Courtesy Pet Food Direct

I’m not a typically over-emotional person… really I’m not. I can usually stare straight ahead and shrug my shoulders as the world comes crashing down around my ears. Sometimes I can even manage the faintest hint of a smile. But… not when I’m sleep deprived. Which I apparently am. Why else would a forty-pound back of dog food set me to bawling in the grocery store when I stop by for milk. It was an end-of-the aisle display of the same brand we used to buy for our dog… but she died THREE YEARS AGO. Three. Years. Ago. It’s dog food for crying out loud…*sigh*. I really, really need a nap.

I looked longingly at the La Quinta Inn on my way home from the grocery store… but no. Ken would have figured it out and come after me. I know he would have, because he’s told me he’s had the same crazy wish. Just a quiet room with some comfy pillows for a whole luxurious eight hours. No interruptions. Is that too much to ask? I’m typing this at two am by the way. Because I’ve given up on my pillow. It’s just not to be. About every 10-30 minutes, Jacqui has been needing me to hook up her decompression tube to her G-Tube during this CVS episode. And I feel like a big whiny baby when I see what she’s going through, but wow… this is really bordering on a torturous level of negative quantity sleep.

During the two-and-a-half hours when she did sleep last night, Kyle didn’t. He had a bad dream or something and woke up terrified. What in the world could a twenty-three-month old who’s never known anything but butterflies and rainbows find so terrifying and why did it have to come and bug him at four am??? Honestly.

So we sat and sang songs and I held him close, whispering in his ear all the wonderful things he could grow up to be one day, all the while longing for my pillow. I reminded myself how someday I would long for nights when I could cuddle my baby boy, that they are growing rapidly short. And this logic might make sense to my sleep-deprived brain sometime two weeks hence. But not right now. Try as I might to savor the moment, my body screamed out, “Just go to sleep kid!! PLEEEEEEEEZE!!” So I sang yet another song, then finally laid the sleepy little monkey back in his crib at ten minutes to five am.

I had just touched my ear to the pillow and Jacqui’s feeding pump alarm started beeping, red LED screen flashing frantically, “DOSE…DEL, DOSE…DEL…” So I got up, rinsed the bag and added more formula, re-primed it, threaded the tubing back into place, made sure all the clamps were opened, cleared the dose delivered, re-set the dose volume, got Jacqui up to go to the bathroom, decompressed her G-tube, hooked her back up to the feeding tube, started the pump, re-filled her warm water bottle and tucked her back in.

5:20 am. I face-planted into my pillow and slept like a rock. For twenty minutes. Then Jacqui woke up needing her decompression tube hooked up again. Then Kyle decided it would be a good day for an early breakfast. And now it’s two am Tuesday morning and I’m half-way through a repeat of last night.

Ken’s sleeping in the family room so he can be semi-alert at work. He did take the eight pm to midnight shift for me, but for some maddening reason, I laid there just looking at the clock, utterly exhausted, telling myself “JUST GO TO SLEEP!!” And I only managed to sleep the last hour of it. I want to run up the white flag, but I’m the reinforcements… wait, no… that’s not right… “We have met the enemy, and he is us?” Something like that. I’ll be exceptionally pleased with myself if I read this next week and it makes even the remotest amount of sense. Good night to all you lucky, lucky people who get to spend more than thirty consecutive minutes with your pillows this week. I’ll try really hard not to be jealous.

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