My Thoughts Are Not My Own

The later my kids go to bed, the later I go to bed, and it's killing me.  Or at least irritating me, which is close enough to the same thing to warrant complaint.  It's summer, and that should mean long, lazy nights plus slow, late mornings.  Except in the Heavenly Household, it doesn't mean that at all.  It means busy, late nights plus same-time-as-always mornings plus cranky kids.  Or cranky mama.  Aren't they the same thing?

And I don't even know what I'm doing late at night, except stubbornly demanding that my me-time isn't lessened just because the kids were cutting into it with their late bedtimes.  So they didn't go to bed until 9 o'clock?  FINE THEN I WILL STAY UP UNTIL MIDNIGHT.

As if I'm tricking the earth into rotating slower in accommodation of my needs.

(Wouldn't that be super awesome?)

Instead, the earth mocks me.  The cicadas in the woods tease me.  The moon stares at me. 

While I read or watch PBS or refresh Facebook with frenetic repetition because something entertaining MUST have been updated within the past 120 seconds, right?  Oh, and Pinterest -- don't get me started.  I'm convinced our brains are all on hyper-mega-overload and that we can no longer sustain simple, one-dimensional thought.  If that's even a thing; I wouldn't know because my brain is firing in too many different exciting, creative, hilarious, delirious directions at once.  Or so the internet leads me to believe. 

When I skipped to bed last night in that hyper-tired state of the living dead, I decided to read for just a few more minutes because I declare books-in-bed to be the very best of sleeping aides.  The correct dosage is debatable, but for me, two chapters and just-one-more-page work rather well.

My eyes got scratchy.  My body got soft.  The tension and swirl of too many thoughts evaporated into the night air, and oh...

I rolled over, ready for sleep.  Everything was quiet except for the nightime racket in the forest.  I breathed in.  Out.  In.  Ouuuuutttt....

And you know how the half-sleeping/half-waking brain pulls insane jokes out of its back pockets just to freak you out?  How you're just barely aware that your last thought made absolutely no sense, but you'll fall asleep in approximately 27 seconds, so it doesn't matter anyway?

That happened.  Right at the intersection of drowsy and zonk. 

Ray Liotta -- the Goodfellas Ray Liotta, not the Field of Dreams Ray Liotta, although that would have been even creepier now that I think about it -- looked me squarely in the eyes, pointed an accusatory finger at me and said, You PINCHED the french toast.  His incensed voice rang quite clearly in my quiet bedroom.

I immediately felt sorry for my transgression, of course.  Then wondered why my errant pre-sleep thoughts conjured up Ray Liotta and french toast in the first place. 

And then zonk. 

Seriously, I NEED to go to bed earlier, people.