Bad luck be gone

Our little family of three just can’t seem to get a break these days: colds, flu, pink eye, broken limbs, a sprained ankle (Nate’s latest contribution to our health crisis). I was calling it the hat trick of motherhood for a while, then the triple threat, but now I’m starting to run out of my pitiful sense of humor. Clementine is backsliding on her sleep habits, and although I was sympathetic at the height of her illness, now she just seems willful and even a little spiteful. She screamed “Mama!” for more than an hour last night, no matter what I did to calm her, so I just left her in her room until she eventually fell asleep. When I went up to check on her, she was practically still sitting up: her legs were crossed and she had piled blankie in her lap to rest her head on it. Of course this wasn’t going to last all night, so I wasn’t surprised to hear her at 3. I went in and quickly comforted her, but she was up again at 3:45. I let her yell her Mamas for 45 minutes before I just gave up and went in. Know what I found? She was standing up in bed the whole time! Just standing there, not falling asleep, not getting tired. I thought I was going to have a mental breakdown. Instead I took her into our bed (my bed, really, since Nate and his injury were parked downstairs on the couch), where she relegated me to one small corner. I must have been one bad ass in another life because I’m paying back my karmic demerits in triple lately.

I’m not letting this become part of the February blues, though—we are determined to get some joy out of Detroit’s annual Winterblast downtown this weekend, even if it is brief, even if we’re helping Nate hobble around on his one good leg, even if the snot that has been running out of my nose for the last few days freezes on my face. We WILL have fun, dammit.

And I will return to my poor, neglected blog this weekend as well. I have stories to tell of the politics of pick-up and drop-off (Nate experienced the strangeness of this ritual the other day, so I have proof), and perhaps we will once again have a digital camera on hand so you can see how much cuter Clementine has gotten with all this illness and lack of sleep.