Sleep deprivation

I live it.

I am a night owl, by some strange quirk, and it makes for some interesting events. Even as a kid, I was wide awake late into the night when my peers were getting tucked into bed HOURS before I even cracked the first yawn. I'm not a morning person, and require coffee-kick-starting. This week, Evil Genius has been going in to work at FIVE IN THE MORNING. Kill. me. please. This means I get up at 4:15 to take him to work, because he doesn't have a car yet. There have been a couple days that I got up after only a few hours of napping, and one of those nights, I don't even think I caught what could be considered a nap. Dinner has suffered for my lack of energy to think, much less plan or prepare food for the less-occupied household. It's much quieter since Clone and Beast left town with my father-in-law last week. Clone is at camp, and having an ABSOLUTE BLAST! The pictures I am seeing of her show a radiant smile and sheer joy. And I'm eternally grateful to the two aunts who trade their services as nurses in exchange for camp tuition. It would be fiscally out of the question if I had to cough up the cash for her to go. So, I get to live vicariously through my daughter, always a slight pang of envy because she's been given this amazing opportunity. Beast is helping my father-in-law clean up PawPaw's lake house. PawPaw died right before Thanksgiving, and left the house to the grandchildren. It avoided some of the pesky debates that would have come up otherwise. My son and his father's father are a fair bit alike, even though the boy has feet that are identical to my dad's, minus the gross toenail from an injury.

But life here must go onward, and onward it does go. The rest of us here are going to work, pecking along...and I'm just barely scraping myself off the couch some days. I'm thankful for the McCoffee the boy brings to me in my mom-bus, with the requisite creamer and sugar to doctor it up to my taste. Smart child that he is, he brings me a large. I have trained him well in the art of avoiding a cranky mom. Of course, if he got a car so he could take himself to work, or managed to not be scheduled any earlier than say, 6 in the morning, I could probably deal with it. But the sleep deprivation is a minor trade-off for getting a child to his job. This is especially monumental considering there was a time I was seriously thinking this boy was going to be the death of me, himself, or others in the process of getting him through adolescence.