Sleepy Mondays...

It was a long night, with neither an overabundance of darkness or storminess. (It was also not the best nor the worst of times. Oh, and if you call me Ishmael, I will not respond. Okay, stupid first-line jokes are done now. Carry on.) Rooster scared the daylights out of me, which is kind of hard to do around midnight, by opening my closed bedroom door when Pig and I were sound asleep. None of the kidlets have ever, and I do mean ever, opened my bedroom door without knocking before now. I jumped about three feet in the air, convinced that someone must have broken in to our house to rob us. It took me a moment to realize that the "robber" was close to four feet tall and crying.

The end result was that Rooster kept waking up with bad dreams, and although she fell back to sleep easily enough, her poor sister, who is stuck sharing a room with her, was unable to fall back to sleep until around the time I had to wake them up for school. Horse looked like death warmed over when she staggered out of bed to eat breakfast, so I told her she could stay home from school and rest.

Horse was still tired after I got the other two kidlets off to school, but she slept for awhile. When she woke up, she and I had homemade hot chocolate together, which made her temporarily forget that she was missing out on her school's book fair by staying home today. We ran a couple of errands, picked out a bunch of spring and summer clothing for her in the next larger size, and then came back home so she could rest some more. She was still exhausted, but I didn't want her to sleep for too long or she might have issues falling asleep tonight, thus perpetuating the cycle. A couple more errands later, and we headed off to school to pick up the younger kidlets, and our usual afternoon routine started.

It's been so long since I had a day with just my eldest child home from school. Most of the time, if the kidlets are home, they are sick. That's a whole different ballgame than just having a sleepy Monday with my older daughter. It's a bit of a shame that she likes school so much, because I would be sorely tempted to keep her home more often just to enjoy spending time with her.