Sleep, Sleep, My Kingdom for Some Sleep!

“Can we get a puppy?” Twila sighed from the backseat.

I gave her my canned answer, which she has heard three hundred times, “when its warm out and everyone is sleeping through the night.”

“I am sleeping through the night,” she countered.

Having picnic’s on the kitchen floor at 2am is not sleeping through the night, I think. But I don’t say this out loud. “Jada isn’t,” I say and she looks back out the car window.

She is temporarily satisfied and her mind is already onto something else. But I am taken back to that night just a few nights ago when Twila sleepily found her way into our bed. After the standard bathroom break, sip of water and cuddle, I could tell that she wasn’t going to be fading back out like she normally does in the middle of the night. She sighed. She flipped this way and that, she flopped. Finally she bent over my head and whispered in her too-loud-toddler whisper, “mom, I’m hungry! I need a snack!”

My bleary eyes squinted at the clock, 2:15 am. Ug. The worst. So far from first going to bed, so far from morning.

But trying to make a hungry toddler go back to sleep is a fruitless endeavor, every single time. We had just arrived back into town that afternoon so the fridge was virtually empty and 2:15 am is simply not my most creative time. Through good luck, persistence and grace, I found a few crackers and some kefir (drinkable yogurt) that was still within its “best by…” date. The kitchen was a mess, furniture moved around to make room for our luggage. In my stupor, all I could come up with was a makeshift picnic blanket (a drying towel) for her bare bottom on the hardwood floor. I sat heavily next to Twila, eyes half closed and waited for her to eat.

I looked sideways at her to see that she was as bright and alert as if it was eight thirty in the morning, big, round eyes, glowing glassily, as she delicately dipped the tiniest tip edges of her crackers into the yogurt and then nibbled the yogurt-covered pieces off with the tips of her front teeth.

But instead of being irritated by the tediousness of the process like I’m sure I would be ninety nine times out of one hundred, I laughed softly under my breath and patted her back, knowing that this would be one of those moments I remember when I am ancient and laying alone in my bed.

As I sit there, fighting sleep, I also think about the afternoon we spent just days before, sitting on the sun-warmed balcony of our hotel. I was typing while Twila was carefully looking over the edge of the railing, toes perched on the cement curb that supported the wrought iron, patterned railing. I went inside for a moment to retrieve my power cord and when I turned back around she was gone. Gone, utterly vanished. Out of a complete lack anything else to do, I ran to the balcony and screamed, “TWILA!”

And out she popped from behind the wide, wicker lounge chair, grinning from ear to ear. My legs shook and I sat heavily on the cement balcony floor, sick to my stomach. A cold sweat had formed over every square inch of my body. “We’re going inside,” I said weakly. Twila was thoroughly entertained with herself and didn’t understand why the fun was ending but came inside when she saw the desperate and peaked look on my face.

I shook the thought from my head as I sat on the kitchen floor at what was now nearly 3am, patting my daughter’s back and waiting for her to finish her snack, I thought, there are worse things I could be doing at 3am.

She has been asking for pets a lot lately, dogs, cats, kittens, birds, mice, gerbils, chinchillas. I for one want fewer pets. We are down to two cats and they behave like a pack of twenty or so stray dogs. They circle the house in a continuous hunting pattern, looking for ways to irritate me. They vomit, they scratch the carpet and the couches, they eat plants and vomit more. But sin of sins, they wait until I am laying Jada down on the soft guest bed in the cool dark of the guest room and they hide outside the door and meow in the loudest, most alarming decibel one can imagine.

If you have ever been at a sporting event and accidentally sat in front of the nimrod with the blow horn, you have some idea of how loud these slight cats can make themselves sound. It is alarming. It makes me want to do things to them that I have never thought of doing to a living animal. Like sending them across the lake in a giant sling shot.

So it’s hard for me when Twila asks for pets, because I don’t particularly care for the ones we have. I know that it’s good to have pets, to care for animals, especially as a child. But I cannot fathom having them now with so much else going on in our lives. It seems that no one has slept all the way through the night in this house in over four years. This morning Ryan left and somehow, miraculously, Jada and I were still resting peacefully in the quiet, early dawn dimness. Twila, on the other hand was not. The girls take shifts, it seems, on sleeping in.

So Twila pranced in, whispered loudly that she was going to go play in her room. Pranced out for a moment then back in to ask for a snack, a glass of water, company to the potty. I suppose I can’t be surprised that my three year old doesn’t want to be alone in her room before she’s even had breakfast. So I ripped my limp body from the covers, eyes half closed, teeth sore from clenching my jaw, mouth dry and body begging for more rest; I staggered in to Twila’s room swearing to myself that we would not get a puppy until the girls want more sleep than I do.