Saturday night turned out to be awful, with both girls being up for two hours in the middle of the night. It could have turned out better, but it’s hard to think on your feet when you’d much rather be in bed. Since Anna’s room is apparently infested with witches, we put a plan in place for Sunday night by which she could quietly come into my bedroom if she got too scared, which she did around 2am. Thankfully, she was quiet and composed, and the switch was made without waking up Tara.

On Monday I did make a point of discussing with Anna the significance of Memorial Day, but she refuted my romantic description of soldiers dying for our country and how her uncles and grandfather had been soldiers and had put themselves in harm’s way for our national defense. After further discussion, she began asking about the soldiers from other countries and what made them bad guys and our soldiers good guys. She’s six, ladies and gentlemen. I was caught completely caught off guard. I started to explain further, but in the end I punted and distracted her with the TiVo. Let no one say that raising a critical thinker is easy.

As much as I hate to write post that are just a event-by-event account of my day, I’m going to do it anyway. Jennifer left yesterday to go visit our newest nephew, leaving me with both of the girls. Anna has been particularly trying lately, so I know I’m in for a fairly rough week. To start out, neither one of the girls slept much last night; Tara woke up three times in the early evening, and then Anna came home from what was supposed to be a sleepover because she wasn’t sleeping either. She ended up sleeping on Jen’s side of our bed, and both girls decided to get up at the regular time despite missing several hours of sleep. Anna had her usual morning in which something upsets her and she explodes in a huge ball of fire and destruction. Normally calm Tara then becomes jealous of the extra attention paid to Anna and explodes as well. Toss in some more crying, hitting, attempts to run away from home, and it’s just another typical morning at weresotired.com.

I finally managed to gather up the girls to go to Pancake House, where we saw my boss, who later called me to say that he had found a Nintendo Wii at the store and picked it up for me. I’ve been looking for one off and on for months. After a failed attempt to go to SeaWorld and a stop by Target so that Anna could spend a birthday gift card, we picked up the Wii and went home for lunch. Tara took a nap while Anna and I learned a little bit about how to play the Wii Sports games. Two hours later we learned the important of tightening the wrist strap properly and called it a day.

After nap we visited the neighbors, who never fail to remind me that no matter how much you have going on, somebody else is bound to have more. After a quick dinner comprised of the last remains of food in the house, Anna decided to put on her best Stepford behavior and help out marvelously with bedtime. Hopefully she wakes up in that mood tomorrow.

I dropped off the face of the blog as soon as Jennifer home because:

• I was really really tired and needed a break.
• I was really really busy at work because I missed so much of it while Jennifer was gone.
• I was really really busy at work getting ready for my trip to Barcelona.

I leave for Spain tomorrow, so I probably won’t be doing a whole lot of posting for the next week, but if the internet connection is good I should be posting some pictures, especially toward the end of the week.

Since my last post, things went from bad to worse. Anna’s behavior was fairly unmanageable for most of the weekend, and to top it off, the nanny was ill on Monday. I took yet another day off work, which I can already not afford to miss, and the prospects for peace in the house were not good.

Fortunately, today was much like a normal day, and I had no aspirations of trying to get the kids to eat healthy food, or do activities more constructive than watching TV, and there was relative peace. Only one more day to go. If every day went like today, the two-week solo stint would be doable. However, the kids would be ignorant couch potatoes. Win some, lose some I guess.

In my daily rant to Jennifer, she suggested I figure out some make-good activities for after she gets back. Go ahead and retrieve your train of thought from the gutter. I’ll wait.

• Since I’m behind on my work and need to prepare for my trip to Barcelona, I will have to put in some long days at work. I have a hard time switching into domestic mode and then switching back to work mode at home, so it’s better if I just go for a few long days.
• I need some frag time with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which I bought at Fry’s a month ago and have been playing from time to time.
• I’m still looking for the perfect MP3 player, and I would like to see if I can get something before my trip. I’ve been looking at the devices from Cowon, because they support OGG format (which I use for radio recordings), and you don’t need Windows or Mac to use them. The iPod hardware is great, but I just can’t deal with the software requirements. Since there is no perfect MP3 player at this time, I may have to settle for another gadget, the Neuros OSD Media Center, which is probably as brilliant a hacking platform as any.
• Exercise. Finally.
• Sleep. A lot.

Only one more day to go.

On the twelfth straight day of solo parenting, I’m feeling like I have used up just about all of my patience and good cheer. I’m a bitter, withered, underslept shell of a human being and I’ve still got four more nights to go. Tonight, in a effort to avoid washing dishes, I drove the kids to a restaurant despite their behavior indicating that it was going to be anything but a pleasant dining experience. When I opened up the van and started getting them out, Anna started spitting on her shirt. I snapped. I buckled Tara back into her seat and drove back home despite Anna’s wailing. I just could not stomach trying to manage their behavior any longer. In retrospect I know Anna’s nose has been bothering her today and agitating her; tomorrow I’ll be more liberal with the Benadryl and hope for the best.

Wednesday night was absolutely awful. Tara was up once or twice per hour until about 1am, at which point Anna woke up and was up for about an hour and a half. I was seriously considering hauling everyone into the car to go to urgent care, because nobody was sleeping anyway and Tara’s lungs were so congested that she was coughing nearly to the point of vomiting. Everybody slept between 2:30-5:30am. I was in a desperate situation by the time the nanny showed up. I was fairly relieved to go to work for a while, but I returned to take Tara to the doctor. Of course, by the time we got into the doctor, Tara was significantly improved, and I left with little hope for the next night. I again put Tara to bed an hour early, and Anna down half an hour early. I was so wiped that I fell asleep at 8:15, then was awakened at 9:30 by Anna, who had a nightmare and crawled into bed with me for the second night in a row. Amazingly, I was the first one up at 5:30am, and Tara slept until 6:30–that’s 12 1/2 hours straight. I was in an absolute state of bliss from the time I woke until Anna woke up, whining that she had a sore throat–a sure sign that I was in for several more days of cranky child hell. Later in the morning, after some Tylenol and breakfast, Anna was feeling much better. I’m not sure if she actually has a sore throat at this point or if she is just milking the situation for extra attention. At this point, everyone is still in their own bed, and not a peep out of either one since bedtime. There, I jinxed it.

Tara’s cold/cough/fever has taken a turn for the worse. She was up several times last night coughing and crying, and this morning woke the whole house up at 5am, absolutely miserable. She refused to eat anything, and wouldn’t drink anything but juice. Anna was cranky at having been awakened early, and jealous of the attention Tara was receiving. By 7am I was just about at my wits’ end. I realized early on that Anna did not have school today, so at least the pressure was off to get her going and out of the house (in her mood, even 2 1/2 hours would have been a challenge). I was exhausted solo and had two tired and cranky children. By 8am things were looking a little better; after Tara had some Tylenol and Anna had a video and the nanny showed up, I called the pediatrician’s office, and the nurse basically told me to give Tara some cough syrup and soldier on, because the cough going around can last for weeks.

I felt I could safely depart for work. I again manage to make some headway on my to-do list until 2:30, when the nanny called to say that Tara was very fussy and refused to eat or sleep. I came home early from work to find Tara tired and cranky and coughing, Anna still in her pajamas and refusing to go to gymnastics, and the nanny looking somewhat frazzled. I had her take Anna to class while I tried to get Tara to sleep, then called back the pediatric nurse; this time the same nurse said I should take her to urgent care, and it was too bad I hadn’t called earlier. I decided it wouldn’t be very productive to unload on her at this point. It was really too late in the day to try to take both girls to urgent care and get them fed and in bed, so I loaded Tara up with cough suppressant (which the pharamcist tried to talk me out of, but that’s another story) and Motrin and put her to bed an hour early, and I’ve got Anna (who didn’t nap) going to bed half an hour early.

Wish me luck, there’s still a week to go.

It was a really good thing to be able to fall back into the regular work week today. The nanny got her car problems straightened out, and I was able to get into the office and start getting caught up on what I was already behind on before I had to unexpectedly take a day off from work. Tara is feeling better today; her fever is gone and she’s not coughing as much as the last couple days, but still has a hoarse voice. She has been so cute lately that I captured some lousy video on my phone just to get something to post, so please enjoy.

Update: somehow I had borked the audio on the movie, but it’s fixed up now.

The day started well enough; I awoke to the sounds of Anna fixing her own breakfast downstairs at 6:30. Tara was still asleep. Anna did a terrific job of getting herself ready, and I had the foresight to put Tara down to sleep in the next day’s clothes, so we were all ready to head out the door well ahead of schedule for once. It was then that I got a call from the nanny that her car had broken down on the freeway and she narrowly avoided an accident. Things sort of spiraled from there into an ugly situation involving an asinine police officer and her ailing father. An hour later she informed me that the car was taken care of, but she wanted to look after her father, so I ended up staying home with the girls, unplanned.

Throughout the day, Tara seemed to be coming down with something. She’d been occasionally cranky since yesterday and was sounding congested. By 10am I was feeling pretty wiped out; having had a few nights in a row of inadequate sleep. After picking up Anna and having lunch at home I was hoping for a little downtime with Tara napping and Anna having quiet time. No such luck as the yard guys paid a visit and woke up Tara with the mowing and blowing. It was 1pm, both girls were up, and I was realy for a nap. I decided we needed to get out and do something, so I took the girls to SeaWorld for the second time in three days. We buzzed in just in time to catch the 2pm pet show, then hit the 3pm dolphin show. By then, Tara was looking really wiped out; even in the middle of the dolphin show she was asking to go night-night.

I picked up dinner on the way home, fed the girls, put Tara in the shower, helped Anna with her homework, and got some of the dishes done. At this point, with Anna falling asleep as I type this, my responsibilities are nearly done for the day. I’m hoping Tara sleeps through the night, but I’m going go to do bed as soon as Anna knocks out, just in case someone is up tonight.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.

I have to confess that the first few days of this solo stint have gone quite well. Our nanny has been an absolute rock star, and Anna has been a lot of help in the evenings.

On Thursday, I got out of work fairly late and realized just as I walked in the door at home that I had approximately 30 minutes to feed the children and get them over to kindergarten to an afterschool event. Kid cuisine for Anna, leftovers for Tara, nothing for me. Anna probably spends 90 minutes on dinner more often than not. Amazingly, we made it on time to the event. However, this was a parent-kindergartener event, and we were a parent-kindergartener-toddler contingent, which makes for a really difficult situation when kindergartener attention is required, as Tara was mostly interested in running around and Anna was mostly interested in running after her. Who can blame them? We bailed about 15 minutes after we arrived, then went home and played on the swings. I have to give myself props for even attempting to attend, as the event was scheduled to end at Anna’s bedtime and 1/2 hr after Tara normally goes to sleep. And by “give myself props” I mean “think I might be prematurely senile.”

Tara continues to love reading, particularly when there are items in the book she can name. Since lots of kids books have animals, she is almost constantly commenting as I read: “Duck. Wack wack. Puppy. Woof woof. Meow. Mou (mouse).” I really need to get some video, but Jennifer’s camera is in Germany with Jennifer.