Walking On Broken Glass

We have now been parents for six months and if this was a paid gig our probation would officially be over.* Slowly we have figured out some tricks and trends to manage our children - most of the time.  When it comes to sleep at night, I need to keep my voice down in the upstairs hall as my voice wakes up the minions more than anyone else's does.  There is also a sleep trend of Molly's that mirrors the most important rule of Gremlins, the one about feeding after midnight.**  Aside from the occasional attack from the Gremlins our children are good sleepers.  That being said lately they haven't been the ones keeping us up most nights.

We moved into our place nearly three years before the children were born and for the most part have slept quite well.   After adjusting to the usual home noises that can keep you up at night when you first move we mistakenly thought that the only thing that would keep us awake at night would be screaming children.***  After their arrival I developed a mother's ear and can hear their screams, whimpers and cries instantly.  My mother has informed me that this, "Spidey-Sense" never goes away and that hers faded slightly only to return with a vengeance once she had grandchildren.  The phantom cries, or ones I must hear inside my head wake me up from time to time, even when I've been taking naps and no one is here but me.

Lately there have been strange noises going on outside and inside our house just as we're falling asleep that have us, I'm using the royal we here, up and investigating.  Most nights it's raccoons attacking our compost bin.  I find this really weird because when our green bin was filled with just food remains it was untouched and now that it's filled with used diapers there's a line up of  raccoons jonesing for some dirty diapers, sweet potato skins and old tea bags, also known as raccoon crack.  Other nights our strange noise is the result of the excess of dishes we have laying in the kitchen, despite running the dishwasher at least once a day.  Our cat will decide that 1am is the perfect time for trying to drink the last few drops of a glass of milk, knocking said glass onto the floor creating a giant glass bomb on our kitchen floor.

Yesterday was a really tough day, I was running solo for over 15 hours and both children were teething and really cranky.****  I took them for a long walk to try to tire them out, but my efforts failed when they stayed up for 5 and a half hours straight with a nasty case of the sleepy means and I could barely keep my eyes open.  Finally just after 9 o'clock Chris returned home.  He spent an hour with the babies and we finally got them both to sleep by 10:30 when we collapsed in front of TV with a celebratory beer each before we went up to bed.

We sleepily climbed the stairs to bed - my hands stacked full of bottles of water and a package of formula for a possible night time feeding and Chris loaded with clean laundry.  We had knowingly left the TV room in a state of chaos as neither of us had the energy or inclination to tidy up before bed.  After we collapsed into bed and were almost asleep, we heard this really loud thunk noise coming from downstairs.  Chris went downstairs to investigate.  After about 5 minutes he returned shaking his head.  A pane from the elaborate stained glass light we have over our coffee table in the basement had come unfastened and crashed onto the the table.  Normally we'd be dealing with shards of broken glass and a room unfit for tiny babies rolling around on the floor, but miraculously it didn't break.  Upon retiring to bed we were too tired to put Jack's last pee soaked diaper of the night into the green bin and had left it on the centre of the coffee table, alone, wrapped up like a little unsanitary present.  Apparently fate was smiling on our savage ways because when the stained glass panel fell, it landed perfectly into the soft embrace of the dirty diaper.  Sadly, we were threatened the next morning by a gang of angry raccoons wanting to know where their fix was.

*I don't know if we'd be hired on full time, we laugh regularly at things that our supervisors find completely unacceptable.

**If you are unfamiliar with the 1984 movie Gremlins this reference may not make sense. If Molly wakes up once after midnight for feeding, she'll be up again during the night and generally it's bound to be a bad night, she'll wreak havoc and much like Stripe jumping into the pool, her loud cries wake up her brother causing an issue of multiplication where you have one upset little Mogwai and one Gremlin crawling up your curtains and making sure that no one gets any rest.

***We live in an area of Toronto called, The Junction and eight different train lines run behind our house.  We adapted to this quite quickly and easily.
****My grumpy mood was amplified when our sitter, who was going to give me a 4 hour reprieve while I went for my first post-natal massage to relieve the aftershocks of sciatica and carting around a 15lb pound and 17lb baby, cancelled with the flu.