In Which The Whining Resumes

Next week, Mr. WG is going out of town for a few days. He leaves Tuesday night and comes back Friday afternoon. D. is not going to be happy about the sitch, that’s for sure. But, hey, that’s cool. Because we all know that when D. is unhappy, he’s totally reasonable about it, listening patiently to my explanations, nodding sagely as he strokes his chin with the look of a child wise beyond his years.

Or, you know, not.

The kicker, however, is that Baby J. has recently decided that sleeping through the night peacefully? Totally overrated. Much more fun is waking Every. Freaking. Hour. And being quite vocal about being awake. Vocal, of course, being a euphemism for screaming like a !$&%@ banshee. Generally, when this happens, I start by waiting a moment to see if he’ll settle himself back to sleep. When the laugh track stops, I stagger out of bed, get Baby J., and lie down to nurse him. After a few minutes, I gently shove him over and try to go back to sleep.

Baby J. typically responds by laughing gleefully, crawling out of my bed, and commencing his nighttime wanderings. Said wanderings do not amuse me, so I retrieve him and stick him in his crib. You can guess how well this goes over.

We repeat this process several times during the night. Mr. WG sleeps peacefully through it all. In the morning, he gets up, makes obnoxious comments about how “Mommy doesn’t want to get up because she is lazy,” which Mommy ignores, huddled under the blankets until the late hour of 6:40.

But with Mr. WG out of town, Mommy will have to leap out of bed at approximately 5:30 a.m. in order to get a shower in before the children begin demanding attention, breakfast, and so forth.

The last time Mr. WG went away and left me with four children, I had a great housekeeper. I simply switched her hours – I had her come from noon till 8 p.m., which meant that I had help through the dinner/bathtime hour. My current housekeeper won’t do that – crikey, it’s hard enough to get her to show up at all. Whatever – we’ll muddle through somehow. The anticipation is always the worst, right?