Short-Term Experiment in Sleep Deprivation

Working more or less full-time is not for me. The house is a disaster, and I vacillate between not giving a damn and being horrified at the squalor. Dinner is happening later than we usually eat and therefore bedtime is also sliding. Once the kids are asleep, I retreat to my chair/ottoman in the living room and chart. For hours, and hours. And then I read correspondence - and since one of the providers is out, it involves reading information on patients that I am not all that familiar with and then updating medications and diagnoses.

That first week and how well it went was a total fluke, and made it seem like I could do it.

On the up-side of life, Thea has been incentivized to go to sleep on her own, without one of us sitting in her room until she falls asleep. It doesn't take her that long to fall asleep, but the tape of Chinese school songs she's been listening to for the past three months is beginning to wear on me. Five nights of going to sleep on her own and she gets a packet of Pokemon cards, which is her new obsession, thanks to the boys in her kindergarten class.

We also had the last parent-teacher conference of the year and got Thea's end-of-the-year report card, and she's still the same smart kid she was for the previous two reporting periods. Reading and doing math well above grade level. The surprising part is how well she does in Chinese considering the total lack of reinforcement we're able to provide her at home.

She also lost her sixth tooth. The first one came out last year while we were at Oma's - it was the first couple of days in July maybe (without going back to the blog log to look.) We've bankrolled the tooth fairy to the tune of $10 so far ($5 for the first, $1 for the subsequent ones.)

Micah is making decent progress in being potty-trained. He wakes up many mornings dry and is able to hold it until he gets to the bathroom. Since he's still sleeping with us, the overnight diapers will be the last to go.

Other than those few tidbits, there hasn't been too much to write about - or I'm just too tired to search the cobwebby corners of my brain for something interesting.