I am scintillating this evening

Mostly very tired and grumpy, really. The last day off longstrider and I had off together since the middle of September was Columbus Day, not counting the days when one of us was sick enough for longstrider to take a sick day. Since we have absolutely no help, that's a lot of days of solo childcare, especially when Alec brought a fever home from preschool to give everyone, then got better enough to go back for one day and bring home a cold.

Aren't you glad I decided to post every day? It's far too early to be tapped out, but I just don't have it in me tonight. So, um, here - have a picture of a messy baby:



You know you want him to hug you.

The longest day

About halfway through grocery store this evening, I found myself thinking that it seemed like it had been a very long day, moreso than I would expect from reasonable night of sleep and a not terribly onerous Sunday afternoon of child care. Then it occurred to me: well, it has been a long day.

This is the easier end of the Daylight Savings Time switch, even if you have small children. It mostly consists of parents of small children whining that they don't actually get the extra hour thanks to kids getting up at the same time, then having to chivvy your children through the evening so you can get them to bed at something resembling the normal time. James was climbing up in my lap and plastering himself against my chest at 6, but a bath managed to get the boys through to their normal 7pm bedtime. Now we'll see when they get up tomorrow morning.

For perhaps the first time, I'm seeing a little bit of the benefit of our government's sadistic desire to let us experience jetlag without ever having to leave the comfort of home twice a year. The increasingly late sunrise has been making it harder to wake up in the morning, and combined with last week's toddler insomnia fest, Katherine was late to school twice. We're not in the habit of needing an alarm clock because 1) I rarely need an alarm to wake up on time and 2) James is typically up by 6:30 and the wakeup call of a toddler running across your head is usually pretty effective. But when said toddler decides to be awake for hours in the middle of the night and then lie down on the job by sleeping in the next morning and I've only had two hours of sleep, suddenly I find myself waking up at about the point when we should be leaving.

Obviously we're going to start using an alarm clock, but I also think that more light in the morning will make the morning up and at 'em rush and drive easier
.