Naps

The last blog entry I made was long, involved, passionate, and well-written. Too damn bad I played around with an inauspicious series of keystrokes and erased the whole friggin' thing. Made me so mad I refused to even try to blog for a bit.

This morning I awoke at 2 am, panicking. I didn't get the entire back yard weeded before I went to sleep. I didn't clean the whole house. I didn't finish editing the next book for hard-copy publication. I forgot to do my daily devotional reading. I didn't bathe both dogs, give my ugly old toes a pedicure, or steam clean the damn carpets. What a loser.

All I did was baby-sit Lillian for a few hours, and it wore me out to the point that I was useless for the rest of the day.

I made taters-and-eggs for us, and since blue is one of the two colors Lillian acknowledges to exist ("boo" -- and the other color in the world is "biss," that is, "pink") I made some extra fried blue potatoes. We stuffed ourselves and then loaded the car full of paper products and took them to the recycling bin. Then we went to Target to shop. That's it. It was fun, I laughed, I felt warm fuzzies about my granddaughter, I had rushes of linguistic analysis of language acquisition and glimpses of grammatical deep structure being formed in that little head -- and I was completely exhausted by the time we got home.

By three in the afternoon, I was still thinking, "Just a few minutes, and I'm sure I'll rebound. I'll be productive, I'll go out and weed the back garden, I'll finish the laundry..." by seven I still hadn't rebounded and nothing had been done.

My friend Bill has a method for dealing with exhausting incidents: he "takes to his bed." Was his week teaching simply horrible with restless kids and irritating superintendents? He'll take a day off and stay in bed all day, except for necessities. Did the winter day dawn gloomy, icy and inhospitable? Bill loads up a stack of favorite books and a plate of goodies and alternates reading and napping. While that sounds like a cop-out, a cave-in, a wuss way of dealing with stuff, somehow I think Bill has figured something out on a very basic level. "Resting" is something that makes the body feel better.

When my daughter was a toddler, every time she lay down for a nap, so did I. When she went off to school, her Mommy sacked out for a nap at 10 am until noon. Sometimes it was from noon until the child was due home from school at two-ish. I remember those naps as being essential.

Dealing with little kids is exhausting, and I think Bill has the right idea. I have simply got to nap again when I'm tired. I wasn't too proud to nap when I was 30, why is it such an issue now? Maybe if I had napped in the afternoon, I wouldn't now be still awake at 4:30 in the morning, definitely not rested mentally or physically.

Meh, as they say. Or "Feh." At this hour, Bill is already up and has been either jogging or working out before his busy weekend social schedule. I'm going to look like shit all day from broken sleep and panicky fears about being inadequate, while Bill will have sparkling eyes and a flashy smile. He'll e-mail me Monday, gloating about all that he's done over the weekend, all the dates and travels and accomplishments.

Naps. I need to think Power Naps.

And when I wake up, I'll remember that I'm in California. It will be 80 degrees here today. Bill's weather forecast is for a high of 29. Back to bed, Bill.