I really need to draw a diagram for this, some sort of cross-section of Mabel’s bed containing her and me and covered inadequately by her duvet, which, the night before last, seemed to be letting in teeny tiny blasts of arctic air aimed directly at the gaps between my pyjama top and bottoms, and between the ends of the bottoms and the tops of my socks (yes, I wear socks to bed when it’s cold; so sue me), not the mention the gaping chasm caused by pulling my top up on one side so she can get the goods; exacerbated exponentially by the fact that she, ever-warm, kept kicking all the covers off, while I (oft-chilly) was still shivering and trying to clutch them to me and tuck them under my bum and into the space between my shoulders and my neck.
It was particularly cold the night before last, and our heating system seems to be struggling to keep up (to wit, this morning it was set to 68 and it claimed that the temperature in the room was currently 57. And it wasn’t doing anything to change that). Somebody’s coming to do an energy audit tomorrow, which we’re hoping will tell us the most efficient way to heat the house, because it sure ain’t what we’re doing. It may be the case that we should start using the wood-burning stove, but to do that, we’d have to get the chimney swept and buy a big pile of wood. Anyway, Mabel’s room is at the end of the line as far as heating vents are concerned, and at 3am when she decided to be awake and nursing hard for an hour and a half, it felt as if there was no heating at all. When a small vampire is draining you of your last remaining body heat, and your metabolism is at its nightly nadir, and your nose is cold, well, it’s hard to sleep.
So that was Friday night. On the plus side, she had gone to sleep at 8.10 or so and not woken up until almost 11.00. Which had given me hope for the following night, when I was audaciously planning to leave the house after bedtime and stay out for a whole two hours, whether she woke up or not. Of course, just because I wanted to get her to bed promptly – and had engineered a correct nap and an earlier beginning to bedtime to facilitate it – it took an entire hour to get her to sleep, including fake-out sleep, refusal to detach, sudden reversion to wide-awake, demands for medicine due to (possible) sore gums, and finally a need to go and sit on the toilet.
I eventually got my tall boots on and myself out the door and made it to the moms’ night out only half an hour late – and before most of the other moms. I ate salty Mexican food and drank a beer and talked to people with whom all previous conversations have been carried out with one eye on the monkey bars and broken off mid-syllable by one or other party yelling, “No sticks!” or “Pump your legs,” and/or running away to rescue or reprimand as required.
As I drove home, teeth chattering in the un-warmed-up car, I catalogued the ways in which I might be welcomed:
- worst case scenario: screaming; two children awake and disgruntled
- almost as bad: screaming; only one child awake and disgruntled
- not too bad: Mabel awake but being read to or playing quietly
- totally excellent: Mabel still fast asleep
In the event, it was somewhere between not bad and great: I opened the door to see Mabel startle awake from where she had been almost asleep on her Dad’s chest in the family room. She had woken about 15 minutes earlier, looked upset when I wasn’t forthcoming and she was presented with secondary-parent instead, was brought down lest she get noisy, and curled up quietly without much complaint on nice warm Daddy. When she saw me she nearly got teary again, but was too tired and just nursed back to sleep in bed without difficulty.
I might even do it again some time. The going out, not the freezing in bed. If I can help it.
