Hi everyone!

Did I mention that somebody wonderful just turned one?  :-)

This guy!

Can you believe it?  One!  Walking and talking and snuggly and hilarious!  Aw, I love this spectacular little person.

I love his laugh, his fabulous bald head, the way he says “ball” and “balloon” and “bird.”  I love the sign he makes for “help!” and the wacky little dance he does when he’s excited.  I love his enthusiasm for pears and the way he’ll fling himself into our arms for a hug and how much he adores his big brother.  :)

Sometimes I worry that I shouldn’t post anything about my kids in case it embarrasses them later, and then I think, gosh, by the time they’re in middle school, there’ll be no such thing as privacy anymore, and absolutely everyone will have at least one embarrassing childhood photo posted by their parents out there online somewhere.  Don’t you think?  Still, I try not to do it too often . . . but I figure turning one merits a little photographic celebration, right?  :)  (The actual celebration featured sunshine and banana cupcakes and stupendously wonderful friends.)  :)

I also wanted to post those night owl links I mentioned . . . I’ve written before about being a night owl (or possibly having “delayed sleep phase syndrome,” if you’d like to be fancy and scientific-sounding about it), but that was five years ago (!!what? have I really been writing this blog for that long?!), so now seems like a good time to bring it up again.  :-)

I assume most people think about sleep a lot, since I suspect nobody really gets enough, but I imagine parents of tiny folk think about it even more.  Our two tiny folk happen to be magical wondrous sleepers right now (knock on wood!) who seem to appreciate sleeping as much as we do, but they’re not QUITE on the same schedule as we are.  At least once every night, one of them (it could be either) will wake up and need to be either (a) escorted back to bed or (b) reassured that the world’s supply of pears is perfectly safe.  (That’s just a theory.  None of us have any actual idea why the baby occasionally has middle-of-the-night fits of Utter Despair.)

And they both get up an indecent five or so hours before I would like to.  In fact, the older one has been waking up a couple minutes earlier every day lately, and I absolutely blame the Nefarious Sun for this dreadful behavior.  (We DO have blackout shades!  We in fact have thick blankets pinned OVER the blackout shades too!  AND YET…good morning sunrise, good morning three-year-old.  BLERGH.)

However, thanks to a wonderful husband and a wonderful nanny, I have mostly managed to hang on to my night-owl schedule, wherein I do most of my writing between 11pm and 4am in the morning.

I know, many people think this is quite weird.  I once gave a boy at a school visit a kind of mental breakdown when I explained my schedule.  (“But…but…you have to go to bed!  You’re supposed to sleep at night!  And be awake during the day!  That’s what my MOM says!”)  Sometimes a delivery person will ring the doorbell at 11am and catch me in my pyjamas, and I just know they’re thinking, “really, lady? I’ve been up since five.”  Which makes me all GRR and wishing I had a sign that said, “I KNOW BUT THAT’S WHEN I WENT TO BED.  BECAUSE I WAS WORKING.  IT’S A THING.  A TOTALLY NORMAL THING THAT I BET MORE PEOPLE WOULD DO IF THEY COULD.”

So it’s very reassuring to find articles like this one, in Slate, talking about all the other writers whose favorite writing hours happen in the middle of the night.  That led me to this wonderful article by Kathryn Schulz, who talks about her own night owl habits.  She mentions how she once tried to switch to a regular 9-to-5 schedule and it totally failed; I’m sure that would be the case with me as well.  When I had a 9-to-5 job, getting up at seven every morning was absolute misery.  (Unlike Kathryn, though, I’m still entirely capable of sleeping until noon…I hope that ability doesn’t desert me anytime soon!)  :)

And of course, there’s research all over the place now about how teenagers need more sleep and their whole circadian cycle is shifted over so they’re essentially biologically programmed to stay up later and sleep later, and how it’s basically cruelty that high school starts as early in the morning as it does.  IT IS.  OMG, this makes so much sense to me.  Poor sleep-deprived teenagers!  I’m ready to start hassling all the high schools in my area to change their start times right now; never mind that my kids are eleven years away from being affected by this.

One of my parenting resolutions is to let my teenagers sleep as much as they need to whenever possible — naps! weekends! anywhere! — especially because this night owl thing apparently tends to be genetic.  So we might all be hanging out at 2am again in thirteen years!  Hopefully with books and cocoa instead of blackout shades and Utter Despair.  ;-)

All right, I’d better try to do some actual work around here, or possibly some sleeping, now that it is daytime.  ;-)  Hooray for birthdays and banana cupcakes and beyond marvelous bears!

And yay for spring!  :)

Quote of the Day:  “12:35pm — The phone rings.  I am not amused.  This is not my favorite way to wake up.  My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature I had better ring for breakfast.  This occurs rather less often than one might wish.”  – Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life