There was a period of a few months where both of the kids were sleeping well, not much was going on at work, and we were getting a fair amount of sleep. Of course, good sleep makes for boring blogging, and we have thus returned to our roots–not sleeping.

Tara is now on her zillionth ear infection and has been sleeping badly for weeks. Anna is doing no better, having night terrors on a regular basis. I’ve pulled a few near all-nighters in the last couple weeks, between the kids and my job and my other job. I woke up at 4:50am this morning so that I could fly to Portland, spend the day in meetings, and fly home. Lately, I could fall asleep at any given time of day, if I had the chance, and considering the staggering, ever-growing to-do list in front of me, I won’t have the chance any time soon.

On the upside, I plan to order another monolight for my photography. Jennifer says that I seem excited about my day job for the first time in a long while, although there’s a fair amount of trepidation mixed in. I shot a set of photos for our friend M.’s new baby, and they look awesome; M. has a great creative talent, and had some great ideas for photos, and I think I did a good job of helping to realize them. Though I’ve done the shooting, there’s still a fair amount of postprocessing that still needs to happen, and I have to restrain myself from doing it now because there is so much other stuff that I need to be doing in the short term. Hopefully I’ll be done a week or so from now and I’ll post one or two of the pics if she’s ok with it. Also, I’m going to borrow the props and try to shoot Tara the same way. I’m stoked.

If I was less tired, I would have a hard time falling asleep because of all the stress in my life right now, but if there’s one good thing about being tired, it’s that you can fall asleep at the drop of a hat.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted, and I have felt so far behind on things that I was actually somewhat eager to spend a day at home with Anna, who has a cold an can’t go to preschool today. I began the day (after the requisite child-prep) by making a long list of stuff to do, which really amounts to my usual list of stuff carried over many days, plus some extras. Through the day I have been whittling away at it. Some items are very old, like hanging up the “new” shades in the dining room, which may have actually been purchased in 2003. Others are less old, like returning the Christmas tree (taken down weeks ago) to its place on a high shelf. Our fake tree is very heavy because I believe the wiring is solid lead, rather than that chintzy lead-veneer like you see on modern fake trees. Anyway, it’s about eighty pounds, which is why I picked a nice shelf that is seven feet off the ground and in a corner of the garage behind the workbench to store it every year. Excuse me while I write something else down on my to-do list (”get possible hernia checked out”).

Anna was fairly miserable last night, and this morning, though she has since been feeling better. She has been napping for over an hour now, and I promised her an outing of some sort, so we may go for a bike ride in a little bit. Over the weekend, she participated in her first dance recital. Dance class is something she has been doing since the fall, and it’s very convenient that she is able to have class right at the preschool. I have stopped in on the class on several occasions, and based on what I had seen, I was quite amazed by how well all the children did with their 45-minute show. There were several songs/dances and a short interview with each child–part of the class includes speaking into a microphone, manners, and modeling. I got a lot of good pictures, as I borrowed my friend R.’s gargantuan zoom lens. Even in a room full of camcorder and camera-wielding parents, the guy in the back with the big white lens always stands out.

Also, we believe we may have struck gold over the weekend in figuring out a complicated cross-family babysitting exchange in which the babysitter and the babysitter’s child go to the babysat’s house, while the babysat’s parents go on a date. The babysitter then pump-fakes to the slot receiver, then hands off three children to the flanker on the reverse in the backfield and blocks on the weak side. Got it? Ok, BREAK! What can I say, it’s the playoffs.

I hear Anna waking up, so it’s time to check off “post something to the blog” on my to-do list and see where the afternoon takes us.

Tara decided that she was going to start standing today. All weekend, she has been using Jen and I as jungle gyms, crawling over our legs as we sat on the family room floor. Occasionally she would stand up for 2-3 seconds, then flop over and continue climbing back and forth. Tonight she stood up for quite a long time, then I held her hands and helped her get her balance and she stood easily for about 10 seconds. We repeated this several times, and she would clearly shift her weight to her right side and point her left toe to try to take a step. She got so excited after trying this that she could barely stand up because she was trying to step right away. It doesn’t look like it will be long now…

This is not the continuation of the vacation post; I’m still working on that. I just wanted to document that Anna is now talking like a valley girl. Yesterday, while sitting at the table doing her “homework,” she accidently dropped something on the floor, then said, “Oh my gosh, I’m so busy, can you get that for me?” Wait, actually it was more like “Eauw mah GAWH! I am SEEEAAAUUU busy! Get that for me!”

I glanced under the table and saw neither the dropped item nor leg warmers. Then I said “I can’t, I’m seeaaauuu totally busy too.” Anna then called me a “snoodlehead” and we resumed the twenty-first century.

In other news, I added a couple new mastheads and made a flickr set of all the ones in rotation.

I’m not going to apologize for the long stretch between posts, because while on vacation I have been so relaxed as to be practically gelatinous. You try putting together two coherent sentences when you’re a big amorphous blob of goo. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

I’m straining to think of what it was we were doing on Christmas. Oh that’s right, flying on a commercial airline in coach with two young children. I realize now that I was insane last year, and shame on you all for not having mentioned it to me sooner. Actually the trip was not nearly as bad as it could possibly have been. Anna was astoundingly well behaved on the plane, quietly attached to her DVD player and the blessed video Prozac contained therein. Tara was not so much misbehaving as failing to meet the “all children must be above average” standard we have here at We’re So Tired. Thus, she needed to be constantly entertained for the entire second leg of our flight. If she were inclined to recognize celebrities, I could have pointed out that sitting in my row were none other than Aretha Franklin and Barry Bonds. At least I think they were–since each of them occupied 140% of a coach class seat, I had to stand up periodically just to inhale, and was therefore a little woozy for most of the flight.

Upon reaching Grandma D.’s house at long last, we basically took over the entire house, littering it with suitcases, photographic equipment, chew toys, wrapping paper, clothes, and art supplies. In an effort to keep us outside, Grandpa T. promptly set the pool heater to “simmer,” but this only distracted us long enough to get out all the beach towels and leave them all over the house.

Two days later Auntie K. and Uncle T. arrived, bringing with them yet more presents and an excuse to litter the house with wrapping paper again. Some days later there was an large family gathering of the relatives who are now local¹. We all had too much to eat and were at this point just tearing wrapping paper into confetti straight off the roll just for fun. Or there may have been presents, I can’t remember at this point.

On one evening, Jennifer and I went out with Uncle T. and Aunt K. to a bar, where sat and talked and drank. Had we done this in any other part of the country¹, we would have sat around talking about times past and then look at the younger people around us, currently enjoying the sort of activities we were reminiscing about and realize just how how old we are. This being Florida¹, we sat around talking about times past and then looked around at the grandmas and grandpas using their AARP discount on body shots, and realized just how old were are.

Days later, we began our vacation-within-a-vacation, taking a trip to the Kennedy Space Center, and spending two nights in an oceanfront hotel on Cocoa Beach. The Space Center is very impressive, but we were disappointed by the lack of snooty restaurants in the area. We hauled our good clothes 2,000 miles across the country, and darn it, we wanted to get dressed up and have a rude waiter bring us overpriced food. We settled for a place with good food and a casual atmosphere, and wore our good clothes anyway. Back at our room, we sat on the balcony on the top floor of our nearly empty hotel, looking over the empty beach and listening to the waves.

(to be continued)

¹ All midwesterners are required to move to Florida when they get old. Really. It’s the law.