Good morning! What, afternoon?

Before I get into the body of the post, right at the top here I'm going to wish Lisa a happy birthday. Happy birthday, Lisa. Love you.

I was all set today to talk about the new schedule Lisa and I have worked out for me to write, but then a little bit of parenting life took over.

Lisa leaves for work around five, so at four she gets Abby up to nurse. She then passes her off to me to get her back to sleep while Lisa herself goes off to work.

Only this morning, Abby didn't go back to sleep.

Well, she did go back to sleep, for five minutes. And then she was awake again. Fifteen minutes later she was back to sleep. And ten minutes after that, she was once more up.

You see how this is going to go. Rinse, repeat. Till eight AM.

It was at eight that i noticed her pants were soaking wet. Could it really have been as simple as that? Had I just not checked to see if she needed a change, and she'd soaked through?

Well, not exactly.

I removed her pants to find ... a diaper that hadn't been wet at all, so far as I could tell. But, you know, gone to the trouble of getting pants off and all, so I went ahead and changed her anyway. And found the problem.

The outside of the back of her diaper was covered in poop. I don't know what had happened--I guess maybe it somehow got folded round under her proverbially smooth baby bottom when she last had a diaper change. But she'd pooped, and that poop (apart from the segment that had spilled out into her pants) had been deposited onto the thoroughly non-absorbent outside of the diaper and held against her bottom. No wonder she was cranky.

So I changed her and got a bottle out for her, and by nine o'clock she was out cold.

And I was, predictably, exhausted.

So I took a nap. It's not a problem to leave Paul alone with his toys and the TV for a while; most mornings he gets up about an hour before I do and occupies himself in the living room. I figured my best case scenario would be that I'd get about 45 minutes to an hour's kip before Abby or Paul came up with some reason I had to get up again.

Friends. Friends. I slept from nine AM until NOON. I slept THREE HOURS. It was glorious. I remember, vaguely, Paul coming in at one point to ask if he could have his bath now (he was itching to play with the squirt bottle and exceptionally pink Dora bubble bath he got at the shop last night) and me telling him that's not one of the reasons he gets to wake people up for. And then going right back to sleep.

I remember waking up and seeing Lisa's bedside clock reading 11.45, and thinking for one moment, Oh God, I've slept till noon, and then remember Lisa still hasn't reset her clock since the end of Daylight Savings Time, so that meant it was actually still only 10.45. Oh that's good. I can get up now and I've only slept two hours.

And then I went back to sleep again. And when I woke up again, and Lisa's clock read 12.52.

Three hours.

Now, please don't think this was one of those fabled Consequence-Free naps we all think we remember from our pre-parenting days but aren't positive ever really happened. There were consequences, I assure you. Three hours is way too long to leave a three-year-old to his own devices, and it's not something I would have ever done intentionally.

But the damage was fairly minimal, compared to the havoc he'd be capable of wreaking if he set his mind to it. He'd got out our game of Memory and strewn the cards randomly throughout the house (you know what doesn't make for a good game of Memory? A game of Memory with half the cards missing.), and my computer had been rebooted, which necessitated a timeout.*

Set next to three hours? A price worth paying.

I

*Paul has recently started playing the games at the PBS Kids Sprout website, but a resultant lesson that's proving really hard to learn is that he can only press the buttons that are relevant to that game, and can only press buttons on the computer when it's on one of his games (or turned off).