A Night in the Life

This is how my night went last night. Why does no one sleep anymore?

6:00 - Frances gets a bath and bottle, Mary gets in the bath
6:30 - Frances in bed
6:35 - Mary picks out her pj's and gets changed
6:45 - Read "One Fish Two Fish" for the 500th and final time that day
6:55 - Brush Mary's teeth
7:00 - Mary in bed after much cuddling, arranging of stuffed animals, ensuring that there is indeed water in her cup beside the bed.
(This is how every night goes, pretty much without fail)

7:30 ish - Ian gets home
8:15ish - Ian finishes his supper
8:16 - 10:00 - Hanging around the house. Ian changed the litterboxes and had a shower. I watched the Stuart McLean Christmas special on CBC
10:00 - Bedtime for us! Yay! Sweet sleep. We hang out, chat in bed, get comfy.
10:45 - Start to doze
11:00 - Frances wakes, starts screaming.
11:05 - Change Frances, feed Frances, joke with Ian when Mary will wake us up. He says 3 hours, I say 2.
11:20 - Frances back in bed. She engages in a fierce battle with one of her toys that dangle from the crib rail (It's a peach). Loud battle cries and rattling echo through the house.
12:00 - Doze
1:00 - Mary climbs into bed and kicks me several times. (Two hours! I win!)
1:15 - Ian puts Mary back in her own bed.
1:30 - Doze.
2:00 - Mary comes into our room and stands at the foot of the bed sobbing softly. (3 hours. Ian wins too. We are all winners. yippee.)
2:05 - I take Mary back to her bed, she whimpers and asks for more water.
2:06 - I trip over the semi-trailer parked in the middle of the hallway. Curse softly. Remember why I like to clean up before going to bed and wonder why I didn't last night.
2:08 - Bring water to Mary. She is fast asleep and doesn't notice it.
2:10 - Lay in bed wide awake.
2:30 - still awake. hyper aware. Every sound could be one of those horrible children. Why fall asleep if they are just going to wake me up?
3:30 - finally doze.
4:00 - Frances starts screaming. Put pillow over head.
4:10 - Still screaming. Ian goes to get her. Reports that she was laying in her crib like she had been in a car accident. Apparently the peach won the battle earlier on.
4:15 - Feed and change Frances
4:25 - Frances back to bed.
5:00 - doze
6:30 - Ian's alarm goes off.

Poor Ian had to get up and head off to a very long day of work. I managed to doze back off and finally got out of bed at around 8:30 when I couldn't ignore Frances anymore. I had to wake Mary up at 9. I'm thinking that I may have to start locking Mary's bedroom door again, but I'm not sure that it's worth the horrible screaming when she realizes she can't get out and cuddle with me at 3 AM.

In other news....Mary actually skated the other day! It was amazing, she just decide that she could do it, and she did. She spent most of the class crawling around and rolling around on the ice, which she thinks is very very fun. Near the end of the class they lined up the kids so they could get a picture and Mary kept skating away. They couldn't really tell her not too as this is what we have been trying to convince her do for two months....so, everyone just laughed and applauded, and they finally got a decent picture of the four kids, even if Mary wasn't quite with the group. It was a fun evening, we stayed late for a pot luck, and I got to know a few more people. It's really quite a cool thing to live in a small town. At one point I had to chase Mary down to prevent her from stealing yet another sippy cup. When I was away Frances started fussing, so someone just picked her up and started to cuddle her...and it didn't bother me at all. It's quite the community.