Sleep With Me

In principle, I am opposed to the very biological need for sleep. A third of your life, spent doing absolutely nothing. Not even nothing in an interesting way like, watching Duck Dynasty marathons, creating Star Wars themed playlists, or playing eight hour shifts of Call of Duty, but nothing like looking at the back of your eyelids nothing. Dull if you ask me.

If you’re thirty and slept the requisite eight hours, you’ve already spent ten years of your life sleeping. Ten years sleeping? People get married, divorced and remarried in that time frame. Just think about all of the stuff you can do with that extra time? I mean, that’s what I used to do, as I fought common sense to stay up late and wake up as early as possible in order to squeeze the most out of my waking hours.

But this post isn’t about that I’ll sleep when I’m dead mentality, this post about the concession. The concession that all I want right now, at this very moment while my fingers tip toe across this keyboard, is uninterrupted sleep.

The kind of sleep where I’m watching a television show that I’m interested in but not upset about if I fall asleep on it, and the sleep function on the tv shuts it off ten minutes after I start producing z’s. The kind of sleep where I’m not awakened by one of the triplets who want to pee, or have pee’d and need cleaning, or just decide they all want to sleep with Mom and Dad one by one thirty minutes apart from the other. The kind of sleep where the wife’s fear of all things crawling, produces a sudden yelp, the lights, and then me looking for whatever it was that woke her up for the next seventeen minutes doesn’t wake me. The kind of sleep where my fear of the kids destroying my house in the morning while I try to sleep late doesn’t make me walk downstairs.

That’s the kind of sleep I want right now. Sleep with me.

Snoop Dog Sleeping

My Right Thumb

My right thumb smells like poop, which is odd because I took a shower less than 45 minutes earlier and I haven’t changed a diaper since the shower. I only noticed it while sitting at a red light, I bit my thumb (yes, the right one) out of the anxiety that comes with morning traffic and noticed a familiar scent of stale poop.

I was a confused a bit, because how does one complete a shower with their hands still smelling like poop? Don’t your hands automatically become clean through direct contact with the soap? If you use shower gel, (which I do btw, Dove for Men holla at me for some sponsorship) doesn’t the lather from the loofah clean your hands by proxy? Even still, I’m pretty certain I wash my hands in the shower. Matters not that I can’t recall specifically doing so this morning, I’d like to give myself the benefit of the doubt in this instance.

Personal hygiene aside, I recalled a possible source for the poop smell on my fingers. Before I walked out of the door this morning, I gathered up the latest batch of dirty diapers yet to be thrown out, and threw them in the garbage can outside. Questions possibly running through your mind right now: How old are the triplets right now? Shouldn’t they be potty trained by now? What is your current system of disposing of dirty diapers? All valid questions, and I’ll address only two of them just to spare you the dirty details of diaper disposal in my house.

Right now, the triplets are three years old, and yes they should be potty trained by now. I could say that we’ve actively begun potty training them, but that would only apply if we expanded the definition of potty training to mean putting them in diapers and changing them business as usual. As one half of the parenting unit, I will defer from blaming the other half (which is a useful and favorite tactic of mine) and shoulder the blame for their lack of development in this crucial milestone.

It’s a slight source of shame for me, as I can not tell anyone that my children were potty trained at a young age. Those of you who have kids, or are familiar with the milestone checklist game parents like to play, know that bragging on how early your kids can crawl, walk, talk, feed themselves, run a boston in spades is all a part of making the other parent and their poor child they’ve birthed, wear the proper amount of inferiority when addressing you. I have no status in this arena, my youngest set of children are not yet potty trained.

One of my lovely aunts recently visited our house to drop off some items for Easter. We chatted a bit, discussed several different things, and then she asked whether or not the triplets were potty trained yet. I said no, and made efforts to indicate that poor parenting prevented the kids from this milestone as opposed to the lack of understanding by the trips. This served both as an admission and a move to disarm the possible lecture on why I wasn’t doing more to make the triplets handle their business on the toilet. We laughed about it, and she offered some helpful suggestions: try one at a time, show them potty training videos, some other stuff that I’m sure was great advice but have since forgotten.

Still, spring is here, and the babies were born in August, this ‘just turned three’ business wasn’t a good excuse when it was true. Now, it’s just an unfortunate manifestation of the unique kind of laziness the wife and I have developed over the years, a sorry excuse for a sorry excuse if you can figure out what that means. If this post were a poorly executed metaphor, it would be an emo teenaged suicide attempt, complete with excessive eyeliner and The Cure playing in the background. A cry for help if you will; one of those if you know me (or my wife), and you see me in the streets, ask me how the potty training is going. They say it takes a village…plus, this shit, has got to stop.

A Day In the Life, November 28th, 2012 (pt. 2)

4:30 p.m. – Arrive home. Greet kids, get a rundown of the day from the oldest boy.

4:34 p.m. – Start a pot of boiling water for spaghetti, and begin to reheat the sauce.

4:55 p.m. – Change three diapers. Curse myself for not having the trips potty trained by now.

5:05 p.m. – Locate and wash, the as of yet, unused potties.

5:10 p.m. – Minor heart droppage as I witness The Rose, power through the last container of Strawberry and Banana Chobani that I bought earlier that morning.

5:12 p.m. – Drop the spaghetti noodles.

5:24 p.m. – Strain and then toss noodles with a little olive oil.

5:33 p.m. – Feed the triplets and The Rose. Call oldest son down to eat, but no formal response was received.

5:35 p.m. – Feed myself. It’s a joyless task at this point, but the sauce is pretty good. Minor sadness regarding the fact that I didn’t get any garlic bread on the way home.

6:15 p.m. – Wife arrives with daughter from basketball practice. We exchange grunts of displeasure regarding our day and keep it moving. The oldest daughter efficiently responds to questions about her day with equal parts displeasure and derision with one word answers.

6:25 p.m. – Call the oldest boy down from his 45 minute grooming process in order to shuttle the lad to night school.

7:05 p.m. – May or may not have cried in the driveway.

7:06 p.m. – Unlocks back door, makes reluctant return to home.

It’s around here that I unofficially, stopped writing everything down. The combination of the day coming to a close, physical and mental fatigue, and the tedium involved in cataloguing the day, had kind of, organically faded away. Not much was missed though. At 8:30 p.m., I leave to retrieve my son, but before that, I witness either The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, or the Charlie Brown Christmas special with the trips. By the time I get back home, I’m putting heads to bed. Putting the babies to bed ends somewhere around 9:45 p.m. and sometimes (depending on how defiant they are) 10:30 p.m. It’s at this point, that I might actually try and complete something that I want to do. Usually, I go for low hanging fruit, like watching some television. Cut to three hours later, being awakened by loud sounds from the television and the lights still being on. It’s at this point, after I’ve checked the clock, that I realize that the next time the alarm goes off will be in 3.5 hours and I wonder, “How did I get to this wash, rinse, repeat phase in my life?”. More importantly, how can I stop it?

A Day In the Life, November 28th, 2012 (pt. 1)

5:45 a.m. – Alarm sounds on my wife’s Blackberry every day at this time. It is an effective alarm because it is very loud. How loud is it? Loud enough to be heard from downstairs. Guess who had to go downstairs and turn it off.

5:57 a.m. – In bed again. With no safety net (no snooze button, alarm fully disabled), the possibility of falling asleep and running behind is very real. The anxiety of finding underwear, uniforms and shoes, keeps me awake though.

6:07 a.m – Get out of the bed and wake The Rose. She’s autistic, and despite her many oddities, she’s actually the most obedient child we have. She went to sleep before dinner, so a bath is required.

6:20 a.m. – First child is dressed, and only her hair needs to be done. My wife, her mother, the slowest thing since molasses takes this task on. This process will last up until and possibly after the bus arrives.

6:33 a.m. – The bus arrives, and The Rose boards with no problem.

6:34 a.m. – Boil water for coffee and veg out for a few minutes. Vegging out basically means I check various social media streams while ogling local weather and/or traffic ladies on the morning news. (but don’t tell my wife about that last part, she doesn’t like that)

6:45 a.m. – Make and consume coffee.

6:57 a.m. – Say good bye to the wife as she heads off to her job.

7:00 a.m. – Wake up my oldest daughter.

7:15 a.m. – Check to make sure oldest daughter is out of the bed.

7:33 a.m. – Wait at the bus stop with the oldest daughter. Odd thing though, the bus arrives and my daughter gets out of the car as slow as possible. The bus has to clear a few cars parked on the side of the street in order to pull over to the curb. Once the bus passes my daughter, she starts walking back to the car. She opens the door and says something about getting written up for chasing the bus (which is bs btw), and I tell her to go and get on the bus because it is pulling over. She walks back, and sees the bus is still inching farther down the street to pull over, but she turns back towards the car again. Seeing enough of this foolishness, I let down the window, stick my head out, point at the bus and scream ‘GET ON THE BUS!’.

7:34 a.m. – Go to the grocery store to pick up breakfast and dinner stuffs.

8:31 a.m. – Take call from oldest daughter. She forgot her basketball gear for practice after school. Which means, I have to take it to her before I go to work.

8:40 a.m. – Quick clean up of the kitchen, while I prep breakfast for the trips and start meat sauce for the po’ mans pasta AT THE SAME DAMN TIME!

8:55 a.m. – Serve breakfast, turn on PBS, and finish up sauce.

9:00 a.m. – Sneak upstairs to move bowels, wash thine body and remove unwanted facial hair.

9:20 a.m. – Come back downstairs, watch Sesame Street with the kids and veg a little.

10:10 a.m. – Received a 3 messaged text detailing the in and outs of her lunch order. I put it on Instagram for reference.

10:37 a.m. – Leaves house.

10:45 a.m. – Arrive at daughters school to drop off gym bag. (second time this week with this nonsense)

10:56 a.m. – Head towards Potbelly’s for sandwiches.

11:23 a.m. – Arrive at the wife’s jay-oh. Drop off sandwiches, and exchange quick innuendo.

11:44 a.m. – Arrive at the jay-oh for a half-day’s shift.

I’m gonna stop here and make this a two-parter. This is way longer than I thought it would be, but whatevs, find out what happens next in Part Two.