Who Needs Sleep

Deployents have there ups and downs. A big down for me is that I can't sleep. Every small noise wakes me up. I can't sleep in the bedroom because that just makes the insomnia worse. I have been sleeping on the sofa for a month now. I average about 5 hours of sleep a night. Do you know what getting only 5 hours of sleep does to a person when they have 4 small children to take care of during the day? It means that by lunch time I am exhausted and by mid-afternoon I can't help but take a nap. Most times it is just a small powernap. Just enought to recharge my batteries but not a deep enough sleep that the going ons of the house don't wake me up. Remember, though, I have stealthy children. And they wait for any opportunity to make the most amount of mischief. Sometimes a power nap just doesn't happen and that deep sleep creeps upon me before I can stop it and that is just the moment that the kids wait for.

One of the deep sleep naps caught me over the weekend. For once the older kids were pretty well behaved. The were watching cartoons when I layed down on the sofa and still watching cartoons when I woke up. It was my little one that was practicing her deviousness.

The baby is fasinated with boxes. She likes to eat them, tear them open and strew the contents every which way. During my nap, the fasinating box of the day was a brand new box of tampons. I woke up and found tampons all over the house. She wasn't content to just take them out of the box. She also had to unwrap each individual one and take the tampons out of the plastic applicators. Remeber the story of Hansel and Gretel? I knew every place the baby had gone during my nap by following the trail of tampons. The really big pain of it all is that every time I think that I have picked them all up, I find another one. Ah, the joys of motherhood.