When My Brain Takes a Leave of Absence

I am in a mushy-brained, bleary-eyed, face-splitting-yawning fog of sleep deprivation lately. Not quite on par with having a newborn, but I'm still pretty tired. Clementine is finally getting her first tooth but to make up for lost time she's getting 4 at once, and waking up about 4 times a night per tooth so that's a lot of night waking. And now that Grace is in school I have to get up a 6:30 every morning... didn't think of that when we signed her up....

And then my husband and I have been acting like crazy 20-somethings with no kids and staying up too late, (like past TEN PM people!) for a couple nights in a row, so it's all adding up.  Plus, what with babies who nurse at night for over a year, toddlers who sleep in bed with us, preschoolers who have bad dreams and come into bed with us or need a drink of water, or when I was pregnant and having to get up to use the bathroom, (and some nights all of the above happen!)  I haven't gotten a night of uninterrupted sleep in 4 years, 3 months, 1 week and 5 days.  (Or since the day Moses was born, to be exact.)  So it's REALLY adding up.

Anyway, all that to say that sometimes (most of the time?) my brain is firing on one cylinder.  Often I find myself thinking, "And whyyyyyy did I do that???"  I have many examples.  For the sake of my vanity I'll give you one.

Judah is playing outside on our back deck.  His back is turned to me and my mommy-radar is going off telling me that I should just check and see what he's doing.  I knock on the window and wave when he looks at me, but I still can't see his hands.  He looks at me with this deadpan look that Judah has absolutely perfected and then turns away again.  I knock and wave again.  Still deadpan, still hiding whatever's in his hands.  Now I know I have to see what he's playing with so now I go outside.  Suddenly he's all eagerness to show me what he has, like he was just on his way to turn over this dangerous item to the proper authorities.  Uh huh.

He hands me a small metal hammer and says quickly, "Mo-Mo got dis."

"Moses, where did you get this hammer?"
"Out of the junk drawer."
"Okay, don't take things out of the junk drawer and for sure don't play with hammers!"

I turn to Judah and say, "That was naughty of Moses.  Now I'm going to whack him with this hammer."  And I swish the hammer through the air a couple times.

Now in case you aren't up on our family dynamics right now, we've been having a lot of trouble with the boys fighting.  Sometimes it gets pretty ugly, too, and occasionally I've had reason to worry that there will be serious injury sustained in these fights.  Also, we may have a Jacob and Esau sort of thing going on because the younger in this case usually dominates the older.  Judah has an aggressiveness that usually makes him the "winner" and Moses the one who comes crying to us.  Basically, Judah doesn't need any more violent ideas.

So I tell him I'm going to whack Moses with the hammer and he just looks at me, totally deadpan and serious for a couple seconds.  Then slowly a sinister grin spreads across his face and he nods his head a couple times in a conspiratorial manner.  I can just hear him thinking, "Yeah....wack Moses with the hammer... great idea, Mom!"


That's when the realization that I just did something really stupid starts to flood through my groggy brain....