Ordinary

I am utterly exhausted these days. I think I'm suffering from mother's brain and long-term sleep deprivation. "Mother's brain" may be a term that I just coined, but if you're a mother, chances are you know exactly what I'm talking about. With the birth of your children you acquire (okay, work hard for) certain talents like being the one to figure out why your child is unhappy when no one else can figure it out, somehow operate as though you have 14 arms when you really only have one (the kid is always in the other one!), etc. What you sacrifice, however, is the concentration and memory skills that you might have boasted of before. I can probably count the number of nights that I have slept through the night since January on two hands, as I seem to always be up with one boy or another at night. It took months of George crying it out at night to finally learn that he is perfectly capable of getting himself to sleep (believe me, I wasn't starving him! I still often feed him around 5:00 in the morning if he wakes up because it has been over eight hours). George is a light sleeper, unlike Silas, and he is also an early-riser, so 6:20 seems to find us up-and-at-'em regularly these days.

I'm not too tired to tell you about today's small events though. Nothing special, just an ordinary day, but I thought I would share my ordinary day with you. First off, I knew that disaster would befall my floors because I steam-mopped them yesterday. It never fails that something hideous splashes on my floor within moments of me sterilizing it. Today, it was chocolate milk. Somehow, and I say somehow because I didn't see it but I strongly suspect that Tex was involved, Silas managed to fall right out of his dining room chair this morning. I'm no sleuth, but the scene upon my arrival seemed to indicate that he had fallen backward as he was drinking his chocolate milk, and as he lost control he inadvertently emptied the entire cup over the top of his head. He was sitting on his rear, screaming in the middle of the dining room floor, Tex was happily licking at chocolate puddles, and Silas had streams of milk running from his thick head of hair all down his face and clothes.

So there was that. One of my other favorite parts was when Silas later accidentally knocked a glass of water over on to the table as I was putting away groceries. That one I did see happen, and it was definitely an accident. However, he turned right around to me and asked with wide eyes, "Mommy, what did you do?" Ha ha. Yeah right.

We have George now climbing onto window ledges as if he owns the house, and standing on his own while "reading" books or playing patty cake. We have Tex happily crawling up into my kids' laps, uninvited mind you, to eat the foods upon which they are feasting. We had snowfall, a visit from a great friend in from Maine for the week, and a trip to the grocery store. We had cupcake-baking, Christmas-shaped pancakes, and Mickey's Christmas Carol (yes, it's still Christmas here) and long conversations with Silas about his perceptions of the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. A very ordinary day, followed on the heels of another ordinary day in which George pooped in the tub (again) and we read a million books and we played with new toys. And all on five hours of rest, which is, sadly, very ordinary for me. But my word, how lovely 'ordinary' truly is to me these days.