This weekend was all about catching up on some much needed rest. By Friday, I had a raging case of PMS combined with sleep deprivation, due to the fact that Caroline likes to call me into her room at all hours of the night to play a game I like to call “Find It”. I hear her call over the baby monitor, I stumble into her room in a sleep stupor to make sure she’s okay, and discover the only issue is that she would like her pink bunny and can I please find it.
Oh sure, Mama wasn’t doing anything except trying to get in a REM cycle. The pink bunny is much more important.
She has a special knack for picking things that are invariably at the bottom of the toy box. I think it’s all part of some big master plan to cause me to lose my mind due to lack of sleep, so that by the time she’s a teenager, I’ll just sit in a corner and mumble incoherently.
And I know many of y’all might say I shouldn’t go in there, but I’m a sucker for the nighttime calls because I was the original bad sleeper as a child. I’m always afraid that maybe this time something will really be wrong, and she’ll need something other than Squeak E. Mouse from the bottom of the toybox.
Mercifully, she spent the night with Mimi and Bops on Friday night. I’d like to tell y’all that I actually stopped the car to unload my child and her suitcase, but truth be told, I think I just came to a rolling stop and tossed everything out the car door. There is only so much patience for someone who keeps you up all night and then spends the next day telling you that she’s not going to be your friend anymore, “not at Easter, or springtime or nothing”.
And really that’s fine, I have plenty of friends. I’m also willing to bet that I’m going to hear that phrase many times throughout her life, because the bottom line is I’m supposed to be the mama, which by default means I often won’t be her friend.
Anyway, Friday night I went to bed and slept for ten glorious, uninterrupted hours. I woke up and actually got to sit and read the paper. It was like heaven.
Then, P decided to take Caroline to the ranch for the day. Oh merciful God in heaven, do your blessings ever end?
They left and I spent the rest of the morning cleaning up around the house, tossing a few Happy Meal toys in the trash, reading a book, and taking a long, hot shower without anyone waiting for me outside the shower door and asking me a barrage of questions to monitor my shower progress. I blew dry my hair, I put on makeup, and I started to feel like a real, live person again.
Later that afternoon, I went over to P’s sister’s house to celebrate P’s mama’s birthday. P and Caroline met me there and she came running in, excited to tell me what a great day they had even though they didn’t shoot anything. Then, that night, after she was bathed and in her jammies, I held her close to me as we sat on the couch and told her “You’re the light of my life” and she said, “Oh Mama, you’re my best girl”.
And the best part was, the absence had made our hearts grow fonder and for that moment, we were friends again.