One Cobble at a Time

About 8 months ago I gave myself an assignment.  I wanted to write a complete short story.  I also gave myself a deadline (early June).  But then the story refused to be as short as I wanted it to be and life events forced the setting aside of literary aspirations for a while.  But recently I was inspired by Rowyn’s completion of her novel and I wrestled my story to an ending.

There are so many things I wanted this story to say, but the only way I can find out whether it actually speaks to anyone but me is to ask people to read it.  So I am now inviting anyone who reads my journal to visit the link below and read my story.  Anyone who wants to comment is welcome to do so.   I’m actually hoping for some feedback. You can leave it either in the comments section below, or you can email it to Howard via the Schlockmercenary.com site and he’ll forward it to me.

Thanks in advance to anyone who bothers.

http://www.tayler.com/Sandra/bethansgarden.html

Feb 20, 2005 Edit: The above link has been updated to a final version of the story. People are still welcome to read it and comment.

It began at 3:30 am when Gleek called out. She’s been sick and needed some comforting attention. Unfortunately her call woke Patches as well. I was going to snuggle Gleek first before attending to Patches, but she told me to go take care of him. So I scooped Patches to tuck him into bed with me figuring that was the fastest route back to sleep for everyone.

Then Gleek realized that she’d sent Mommy away and I wasn’t coming back anytime soon. She cried. Fortunately Howard was awake enough to respond to her and I stayed snuggled in with Patches hoping to get him back to sleep. When Patches is sleeping he is fun to snuggle, warm and soft. When he isn’t asleep he is all elbows, knees, and feet. Not snuggly at all. After an hour of being variously poked, jabbed, and bonked I tried putting him into his crib. This lead to 30 minutes of hysterical screaming. (Which by some miracle all the other kids slept through.)

Howard and I realized that sleep was no closer with him screaming than it was with him wiggling, but with wiggling there was much less chance of waking anyone else. And we felt guilty. He’s little. All he wanted was to be with the comforting adults in his life and they’d abandoned him. Howard rescued him from his crib and tucked him back in bed with us. After a momentary spurning-of-mommy he snuggled up and fell fast asleep. It was one of those heart rending sleeps where the sobbing breaths don’t stop until the child has been asleep for 45 minutes. I didn’t stay up to wait for the sad breathing to stop, I slept too.

Morning came far too early and yet I was running late before I even dragged myself out of bed.

I’m exhausted and I’m not done working yet. I’ve still got two kids to put to bed.
Today (In no particular order) I:
Did all the bugeting and banking and setting up folders and clearing out cabinets to set up book keeping for 2005.
Ran load after load of sorely neglected holiday laundry. Folding is looming now. Literally. Some of those piles are ready to topple.
Failed to get Patches to nap despite cruelly leaving him in his crib for extended periods of time where he acquired a self-inflicted (and parental guilt inducing) bloody lip.
Put up with excessively cranky Patches for the rest of the day.
Took down and stowed my Huge Christmas Tree.
Took down and stowed everything else which even remotely looked christmasish.
Hauled boxes of Christmas stuff downstairs to hide until next year.
Fixed meals.
Picked up kids from school.
Met the mother of Kiki’s school friend so that going to play at his house is possible. There is friendship potential there for me as well. It bodes well.
Required kids to do their homework.
Rocked Patches for 30 minutes because even though he was (finally) asleep, every time I tried to actually put him down he’d wake up and scream.
Helped Kiki and Gleek trade beds. Again.
Read stories to Gleek and tucked her in.

I’m hoping that what comes next is peaceful bedtimes for Kiki and Link followed by happy and uninterrupted Buffy viewing and Sleeeep.

Okay. NOW I’m ready for school to start. The kids have been squabbling all morning.

After tonight the luxury of late nights and sleeping-in ends. Sunday morning we have to get everyone up and ready for church by 9 am. This is a significant change from the 1 pm church schedule we’ve had for the last year. I actually prefer the 9 am schedule, but the adjustment period will be rough.

On Monday school begins again. Usually by this point in a vacation I’m ready for it to be over and the kids to have more stuff to do. This time I’m still enjoying the break. I didn’t make them get up once in the past week and I only required the barest minimums of work. The one thing I did try to do was keep bedtimes sane, but that was pure self defense. Getting back to school will be good for us. Really.

At least we get to end with a bang. My parents are due here this afternoon and we’re going to spend New Years Eve together with them and my youngest brother who is headed for college. It is going to be fun.

Today has been a good day for both Howard and I. He was able to be productive. I was able to get DDR to work correctly and I got to finish Going Postal by Terry Pratchett. Now that I’m finished with the book, Howard can dive into it and in theory I can Get Stuff Done.

I’m feeling energetic and ready for a project. Unfortunately the things on the Things Which Need Done list do not match up with the top items on the Things I Feel Like Doing list. Sigh.

On the upside if I get my work done then I can enjoy guilt-free Buffy viewing later this evening. That is assuming I can drag Howard out of the Pratchett book long enough to watch with me.

This evening I feel oddly cheerful. I shouldn’t, because I derailed Howards whole workday by getting frustrated with the xbox and sending him on a customer support goose-chase. (The foolish assumption being that adequate customer support actually exists for a corporate electronics product.)

Having Howard grumpy puts a serious crimp in the day. It used to be that he would haul himself off to Novell and sometimes by the time he came home the grumpy would have been left behind. Unfortunately sometimes the grumpy returned with reinforcements. Now the grumpy just lumps around the house (sometimes switching hosts) until either Howard or I manage to banish it.

My devious plan this evening is to put all the kids to bed happily and early enough that we can banish the grumpy with the first episode of Buffy Season Seven. Mostly I want to be with him and be cheerful so that he can have some cheerful and we can be happy together. That is the best of times.

Over the past week Patches bedtime has gone screwy. It has been kind of wonky for most of December, but since school got out for Christmas he’s been not-sleeping at some really unexpected times. For example on Saturday night he didn’t go to sleep until about 9:30, kind of late. Then Sunday he skipped his nap and was exhausted, but I was unable to get him to sleep until nearly 11 pm. Monday he napped just fine in his crib, but refused to go to sleep there at bedtime. I ended up standing and jouncing him to sleep at 9:15. Determined to put an end to sporadic bedtimes, last night I put him to bed promptly at 7:30. He played happily in his crib until 9 when I had to put Link to bed, then he cried so I got him up to allow Link to fall asleep.

Not knowing what to expect at bedtime drives me batty. I NEED time off from the kids in the evenings. So once again I’m falling back on my old standby of charting sleep behaviors. It’s a trick I learned from the book How To Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems by Richard M Ferber. Basically I create a graph which is 24 squares wide and about 14 squares high. Each line 24 squares across represents the hours of a day. As each day passes I color in the squares according to whether the child was awake or asleep. Red for awake. Blue for asleep. After a few days I can usually see patterns emerging. Once I know what the schedule is, I can adjust it.

In this case I suspect that Patches’ sleep schedule has shifted. He doesn’t get sleepy and ready for bed until sometime after 9 pm. If I try to put him to bed earlier than that he’ll be unable to fall asleep and will rebel at being stuck in his crib. The evenings he stayed up way late were nights where I attempted to put him to bed and met with rebellion and then gave up. So what I need to do now is gradually sneak his bedtime forward. Tonight I’ll try putting him down at 9. If it works, then I’ll do it tomorrow too. The day after I’ll put him down at 8:45. So slowly day by day I sneak his bedtime to where I want it at 7:30. It may mean that his naptime needs to move earlier or be shortened or even that he is getting up earlier in the morning, but I’ll trade that for calmer bedtimes.

Kiki and Link just passed the true test of “Happy Christmas”. They just came home from playing with a friend whose pile of Christmas loot was larger than that of our entire family combined. I half expected them to come home with a list of things they didn’t get. Instead they excitedly told me all the cool things their friend got and then happily went off to play.

Even better, an hour later the friend showed up at our door. He joined our kids in playing with their home-made gifts.