Don't Cast Your Shadow Over the Light at the End of my Tunnel

Most days it goes like this:

We are awoken early to various children jumping into our bed. We get up, if it is a run day I run. Meanwhile, Mike starts to get everyone ready. I take over when I get back so he can get ready. If there is time, he takes them back so I can shower before he leaves. If not I have to shower as fast as possible with the door open, fully ready to run out all soapy and wet should I hear something amiss. Then I disperse children to various locations and do chores and practice school work with whoever is home. Then I pick up people who need picking up. We do therapy if there is therapy to do. Lunch is somewhere in there. Lots of fighting, trashing of the house and screaming as the day wears on. By dinner the whole place resembles one of those "Calgon Take Me Away" commercials from the eighties. There is a whole lot of crazy. I turn into a drill sargent. Cristin tells me about 20 times that her life is so unfair. The boys do their best attempt to cause a trip to the ER. I get them ready for bed. We clean up. I tell them they have to pray and then they are in their rooms for the night. They may not go to sleep right away, but I am off duty.

Mike is in sales and he goes to work midmorning, but he is usually not home until very late. He works 6 days a week. This means I sail through the hurricane, every day, all day. When we hit about 4:30 I focus on that little light that is bedtime and I push to the finish, much like I push at the end of my run and I am sucking wind.

Jack, in his ever craziness decided that he no longer needs a nap. Like a fool, I kept forcing the nap because I wanted to have a break, only to realize that this was physiological, and that he could no longer fall asleep before 10pm. This became a horribl experience and I finally realized that it was time to ditch the nap. This was hard for me to do, because in reality I never really had to go the distance without at least one kid crashing out for part of the day.

Yesterday was the first day of no nap and it went fine. He was cranky but went right to sleep. Today I planned on the same. Today was particularly difficult. There was flooding of a bathroom, utter trashing of the house, crazy fights and much whinyness. I locked my sights on that bedtime and stayed focused. I put everyone in their rooms and sat down to rock Jack. Sure enough, he quickly started to drift to sleep. Just as he was about to go out...

DING DONG

The door chime went off. This was not good. I had to set Jack on the ground and go running. Jimmy was opening the back door. I did catch him. Yes he is still alive. But man...... ooh I was mad. I gave him a few choice words. Thankfully Jack was asleep quickly.

Don't mess with bedtime. That's my time.