7.00pm Mildly cold-ridden and utterly Exhausted Toddler goes to bed.
7.05pm Exhausted Toddler rattles doorgate in token protest.
7.10pm Exhausted Toddler sleeps
11.00pm Ann goes to bed.
11.45pm Ann sleeps
12.15am John goes to bed. Wakes wife with gratuitous bottom-groping.
12.16am John kicked by wife.
12.20am Prevailing somnolence.
1.28am Vixen arrives and takes up well-chosen acoustic position below the
bedroom windows. Cue yowling, shrieking, screaming, Unearthly Din.
1.29am Theory that Ann’s thoughts are, in fact, unable to actually kill, is proved.
1.30am Toddler Klaxon sounds loudly. Frightens away Unearthly Din vixen.
1.32am John visits Klaxoning Toddler.
1.40am John reads Aliens in Underpants to Clingy Toddler.
1.50am John reads The Emperor’s New Clothes to Relaxed Toddler
2.00am John reads The Gingerbread Man to Chatty Toddler
2.10am John reads Paddington Takes A Bath to Bouncy Toddler
2.20am John comes back to bed.
2.21am Klaxoning Toddler.
2.55am John icily invites Ann to visit Klaxoning Toddler.
3.00am Ann visits Klaxoning Toddler.
3.10am Ann unwinds Subsided Toddler from around her neck.
3.20am Ann decants Protesting Toddler back into bed.
3.21am Ann reads Aliens In Underpants to Clingy Toddler.
3.30am Ann reads Brambly Hedge Spring Story to Suspicious Toddler.
3.40am Ann reads Brambly Hedge Summer Story to Beady-Eyed Toddler.
3.50am Ann reads Brambly Hedge Autumn Story to Relaxed Toddler.
4.05am Ann kisses Spaced Toddler and leaves room unhindered.
4.10am House resonates to Crooning Toddler and Snoring Husband.
4.20am Silence suggests Sleeping Toddler.
4.21am Lost lamb takes up position vacated by vixen.
Proceeds to blart loudly and continuously for its mother.
4.22am Demented Cockerel responds with fusillade of rasping Cock a Doodles.
4.25am Ann darkly contemplates Roast Cockerel and Lamb Chops.
4.30am Ann realises she is indubitably coming down with Toddler’s cold.
4.40am Mother of lost lamb lays reluctant claim to insistently bleating
offspring.
4.50am Chronologically challenged Cockerel continues with hopeful racket.
5.00am Ann issues ‘stop snoring/spare room/die’ ultimatum to Husband.
5.15am Lack of memory suggests Ann sleeps.
6.00am John gets up. Departs to lambing sheds. Wakes wife.
6.15am Lack of memory suggests Ann sleeps.
7.45am Cheerful exclamations and loud thumping from Happy Toddler.
7.50am Ann capitulates and unleashes Tigger Toddler from bedroom and
toward breakfast.
Filed under: Parenting Tagged: | Demented Poultry, Hairy Hubby, His Lordship, Poorly Sick, Sleep Good. Sleep Nice.
Perhaps there can be nap time…for everyone.
Hollow laugh. He’s so overtired (after 3 consecutive nights of cough/cold interrupted sleep and No Nap) that he’s totally hyper. Have been reduced, for own sanity’s sake, to plonking him in his room, shutting the gate, and buggering off and leaving him. He cried for 45 minutes before going quiet about 5 minutes ago. I’m scared to go up and check in case I meet beady eyes staring at me!
Of course, the reason he was crying for 45 minutes could have been his NAPPY CHOCK-FULL OF SHIT.
Sigh. Mother of the Year.
Country life – oh so peaceful, right?
(Aha! moment – now I know what the unearthly racket at my parents’ house was. A vixen. Not a banshee! Awful bloody carry-on, anyway).
Nice strong coffee for you, poor girl?
God, yes!
Vixens make a simply horrendous noise. The first one I ever heard, I woke my Dad up to tell him there was someone being attacked outside, it sounded so much like a woman screaming. I’m not surprised it woke H up – mind you, it doesn’t often take much!
If I were you I would be making game pie for tonight’s dinner: filling: cockerel, vixen, and lamb.
My husband snores too, if he’s on his back. So I poke him and ask him to roll over onto his side. EVERY SINGLE TIME he’s 95% asleep and doesn’t get what I’m saying, and every night he’s kind of an ass about it. “What? What are you talking about? What do you mean, roll over? So what?”, refusing to roll over, etc. I can’t kill him because he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but by god I’ve come close.
There has been an accident involving at least 4 dimensions, because we are married to the same man.
I third this. H does the same thing. Also, he insists he was wide awake absolutely was not snoring. AGH.
Ok, girls, the snoring thing can be fixed. It nearly dissolved my marriage. After 2 years of getting no sleep, I was awakened one night to discover that my husband wasn’t breathing. For about 10 seconds. Then he snored so loudly you could hear him outside, and I realized he had sleep apnea. He now sleeps with a cpap machine, and I just sleep. I assume they’ll have to send your DH’s for a sleep study where someone watches them sleep while hooked up to all kinds of monitors, namely a pulse oximeter. Seriously, worth every penny.
Vixens are incredibly eerie and odd. I actually wrote about this a few years ago – I was alone in the house at the time and thought someone was being murdered in the front garden. And I live in a suburban estate.
(the link is here, but feel free to delete it if you like! http://queenofbirds.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/bean-sionne/)
I think the problem is that it’s taking you lot 10 sodding minutes to get through Aliens Love Underpants. I mean, the book is good and all, but I’m suspecting that you three are dwelling on grandma’s knickers too long. Yup, that must be it.
Oh, and it’s time to move to the city.
You know, now I really cudgel my brain I think it was actually Dinosaurs love Underpants; I distantly remember stumbling over ‘Styracosaurus’ in the gloom.
But the city has car alarms…!
Oh good god. How much caffeine can your body absorb in one day?
I’m exhausted just reading that.
Sounds like you need to move to the nice, quiet, inner city.
Ha.
Sorry for snickering at the rural misfortunes of another…
I’d roast away.
g
We also get the screaming vixen procreating under our bedroom window. I’m sure the urban version is sluttier than the country version.
And I remember the lambs and the ewes and the FUCKING COCKEREL WHO CAN’T TELL MOONRISE FROM DAWN, and my heart goes out to you.
Do you not have frogs? They usually add to (surpass?) the symphony caused by blarting goats and cockerels on our farm.
And what is it with 4 am??? When I was a girl It thought they awoke at dawn… but ours always start around 4 am, even if dawn is hours away.
My last six toddlers haven’t awakened me in the night (that’s not to say I get any sleep), but I vaguely remember similar issues with my firstborn and this was just hilarious to read. I hope you have a better night soon!
[...] for the Bean. Def Con one; full klaxoning, in effect. (tip of the nib to Mrs. Hairy for that verb, now firmly ensconced in the household [...]