10:00pm on a Monday night

I’m gonna go ahead and confess- I feel like a crappy mom. I am a crappy mom.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately and I really do feel like a terrible mother. This culminated in me losing my head at Indy tonight during his night time routine.

Every Monday and Friday, we bring him to my mom’s house for daycare instead of my sister’s house. He loves being over there especially because the kids there are more his age. The only downside in bringing him there is that my mom’s schedule for her kids is a little different than Indy’s. Namely, it includes a nap. We got rid of Indy’s nap months ago after we discovered that if he skipped his afternoon nap, he’d go to bed really early and we’d get a whole evening together. From 8:30-11:30 pm, Keith and I get time ALONE TOGETHER. Take that anyway you want, because anyway that it is, is magical. You all know what I’m talking about. So, sometimes when he’s at Mom’s he naps; sometimes he doesn’t. Today, he had a nap. A long one…like an hour and a half long. That’s a full nap. When I called Keith to tell him that Indy and I were on our way home, I told him about the nap and we decided to let Indy go until he seemed like he was tuckered out. His normal bedtime is 8:00, he was going full-blast at 9:30. We finally decided to start trying to put him down before he got his “second wind” and/or became overly tired.

The current time is 10:13. Longer story short, I had the first shift and Indy just laid there in bed whispering little toddler things to himself…kind of singing the theme song to Thomas the Tank Engine…kind of counting in Spanish. He kept doing little things that seem harmless at first but after a few times gets really annoying- like kicking his leg. He’d lift it up into the air and let it fall…over and over and over. Then he’d take some strands of my hair and twist them around his fingers until my eyes started watering. Eventually, I lost my patience and yelled at him to “GO TO SLEEP!” So stupid. How counterproductive. Scare the crap out of your dozing child and wake him up fully to tell him to go to sleep.

I had to leave the room and tell Keith to start his “turn” early. On top of this blow up, I feel even more guilty because I’ve been really busy lately. I haven’t been home very much. There have times where I’d leave to go to work in the morning before Indy was awake and come home well after he’d gone to sleep. Opera rehearsal, Chorus Concerts- whatever…the past few weeks have been kicking my butt. I normally feel really awesome this time of the year, even if I am busy singing Silent Night for the 100th time, but I forgot about that thing called a full-time job. Ugh.

So, now it’s 10:25 and Keith is still in the room. I don’t know if that’s because he’s fallen asleep himself or because Indy is still whispering, “Uno…dos…Thomas…Percy…Maestra Beatriz…”