Partying all night long

Well, not exactly partying, but we were UP all night long.... does that make us young again?? (Judging from the way I feel this morning, I'd say not)

Pete and I have gotten quite spoiled the last several months now that everyone sleeps all night long and rarely do we ever get woken up by any of the kids. But last night was a different story. Here's how it went.

From 10 pm until midnight, Colsen woke up crying approximately 228 times. Even after we got him out of his crib, carried him around and held him, he kept waking up. Even after we brought him in our bed with us, he kept waking up. He's come down with a cold and hasn't mastered the art of breathing while also sucking on a pacifier, so we think he just kept getting frustrated. But after the first hour of all this carrying on, of course the parenting worry starts to set in and we were wondering if there was more going on. Could his ears be bothering him -- should we give him tylenol? Could he be too congested and he won't be able to sleep all night -- should we give him benadryl? Of course we couldn't find any infant-strength medications in the house anyway, so it was becoming a moot point. Finally he asked for some water and after we gave him that, he smiled, calmed down and went to sleep.

So an hour later I finally fell back asleep.

Then, not long afterwards, the power went out. We've been having these "rolling blackouts" all summer long where the power will go out randomly for a few hours at a time. During the day, it tends to feel like a fun adventure -- and sometimes even results in a reason to eat a meal out. But when they happen at night, they cause far more scrambling at our house than we'd like. We immediately jolt awake when the power goes out because it suddenly becomes very quiet. At night we always run a noisemaker.... (As I was lying in bed thinking about this fact last night, I thought how very strange it seems that we purposely went out and paid money for something called a "noisemaker" that we then added to our household. Don't we already have plenty of living noisemakers around?? But the fact is our house has no quiet corners in it -- any noise made in any room can be heard in all the others. So if anyone is ever going to sleep in this house, we need that noisemaker to drown out the other noises.)

Anyway, the noisemaker has become the big cue for our kids to go to sleep, and stay that way. And when the noisemaker goes off in the morning, it takes approximately 2.3 seconds for them all to wake up and hit the ground running. So when it goes off in the middle of the night, we instantly start worrying that all 3 are going to wake up and be ready to party. We (and by "we" sometimes I mean just Pete) leap out of bed and start the scramble to find some batteries to put in the thing. But first we have to start scrambling for a flashlight. Now that this has happened several times, we have finally realized we should keep a flashlight somewhere in the house. But since we're rarely prepared enough to have new batteries in an easy-to-find location, Pete ends up having to find our camera so he can take the batteries out of it.

Eventually Pete gets the battier ins and the noise resumes and we start to breathe, relieved. But as I lie in bed not sleeping for the next half-hour, I start thinking about the fire alarms and what would happen if a fire broke out but the alarms didn't work because we haven't changed those batteries in forever, and we wouldn't hear anything because the noisemaker is running!
Anyway, just as I'm finally drifting off to sleep, Rayna shows up in our room. And Pete puts her back in her room. And then she comes back about 10 minutes later. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. This happens about 5 times. Finally Pete gives up, lets her have his spot in our bed and goes to make a bed for himself on the couch downstairs, ensuring that none of the 3 of us will get back to sleep for at least an hour.

And just after that hour has ended and I'm just about to drift off again.... suddenly 2 piercing high-pitched noises start going off intermittently (which was a vocab word for one of my SAT students yesterday!), about every 10 seconds. Now the smoke alarms are telling us very clearly that no, they might not be working anymore after all. So here goes Pete with the very dim flashlight and me with my tiny booklight (which is not much help for illuminating what is in front of oneself... but it's all I had), to try to find a way to disconnect the smoke alarms. We got the upstairs one done, and then decided against lugging out a ladder to reach the downstairs one. So Pete just came back upstairs, we turned up the noisemaker to drown out the beeping, and finally, around 5:45 am, went back to bed.

I know this is a generally boring post for people to read, but thinking about writing about it was the therapy I needed last night to keep me from going crazy. :)