Yesterday was kind of a long day. I've got a cold and while I didn't want to admit it, I was feeling pretty lousy all day yesterday with aches and a low-grade fever and clogged head and all. I wasn't sick enough to ask Stuart to stay home from work, so I just had to pretend I felt fine and deal with it. The kids have it, too, but it hasn't slowed them down one bit; there's just some extra sneezing mixed in with the running and climbing and tower-building and general mess-making.

Part of the reason I was in denial is that I was scheduled to meet my knitting friends at a café last evening and I really didn't want to miss it. They love seeing my kids, so often we'll meet during a weekday morning, but every once in a while we'll pick an evening time so that I can have a conversation from start to finish without interruptions and actually get some knitting done. I was on the fence all day about going. Yes, I felt crummy, but if I stayed home, would I be able to lie down and take a nap? No, I would have been chasing the kids and cleaning the kitchen and wishing I could be out with my friends. So I made dinner and went to the café, where I sat a safe distance from my friends, armed with plenty of tissues and hand sanitizer, and I had a good time.

At one point we got on the subject of baking, and I told them about how when I was hugely pregnant and had insomnia so severe I would go entire nights without any sleep at all, I would do the strangest stuff in the middle of the night, like bake bread. The Thanksgiving before Anya was born, I remember my parents and brother were here to visit for a few days. There was someone sleeping in every single room of the house except the kitchen and bathroom. I was already spending enough time in the bathroom since I had to pee every 5 minutes, so at 2:00 in the morning when I couldn't sleep and my feet itched, I would sit in the kitchen chewing ice cubes (my only pregnant craving) and knitting garter stitch squares. The night before Thanksgiving, I decided to make the next day's dinner rolls because even with knitting I had a hard time sitting still. Unfortunately, all the insomnia and hormones messed with my head, so even performing relatively simple tasks presented enough of a challenge (I'm still not sure how I managed to pull off my exit recital that same week.) Long story short: at 2:30a.m. something in the oven started to burn, there was smoke everywhere, and I got the smoke alarm removed from the wall and down in the basement barely in time. One more minute and it would have started beeping and woken everyone up. You might say I was going a little nuts. A week later, my doc gave me a prescription for sleeping pills (I only took one).

I may still be sleep-deprived (which probably explains why I got this cold worse than the kids, for once), and I may have days that are long and frustrating and exhausting...but it sure beats being pregnant and half-crazy. All in all, life is good.

Comments

Jessi said…
When I was pregnant with Brynna, I had gestational sleep apnea and I had to sleep with an oxygenator. I found that I absolutely could not sleep for more than a few minutes with that tube up my nose, so I took sleeping pills the entire last 4 weeks of my pregnancy. It was that or go crazy and run off the road on my way to work.

Glad you didn't burn your house down!

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