Surfing the Sea of Sleep Deprivation

I'm sitting on my back steps as I write this today, enjoying a gentle breeze and a vibrant blue sky. The children are playing or finishing up their last whisps of school work for the week.

Our first freeze of the season zipped through last night then left us just as quickly as it came. November in central Texas is very mild indeed.

I am looking at green in my back yard and marvelling. Two months ago today the wildfire started, and since then we have had one day of rain. Blessedly it really was a whole day of rain, a steady soaking rain, from the middle of one night to the middle of the next .

I can't get over how much grass has grown from just this one day of rain. It seemed like so little in the face of an exceptional drought, but it was enough to make grass grow, and keep growing.

I am in a drought of sorts myself.

A dearth of sleep. Sleep deprivation is funny... you'd think with less sleep you would be able to get more done, what with all those extra waking hours. Instead I find myself staring at walls, forgetting what I am supposed to be doing, drawing a blank when I try to think of what to say or write.

My children are very patient with me. Little Warrior is especially good at keeping me on the meal schedule with his "I'm hungry" announcements. He's like my own personal meal-making alarm clock.

We do a lot of reading together on the couch, and lately our sessions there pretty regularly end with me snoozing for five minutes. The kids are getting used to it.

The Princess is a snuggler and she usually has a bony elbow ready to dig into my ribs when I start to slur the words as I drift off in the middle of a page. But when we are finished, one of them often grabs a blanket to tuck around me, or strokes my hair. Such tenderness.

Sleep deprivation can be amusing too... yesterday I accidentally invented three new words: "homeschoolering" and, uh, well, two more brilliant words that I can no longer remember. Ha! Too bad my genius is inhibited by memory loss.

Why sleep deprived? I suppose you could call it insomnia. I find I can't actually sleep longer than five hours many nights. I wake in the middle of the night and that is that.

I know, "He gives sleep to those He loves." It will come around. Things will even back out. For now I ride the waves of fatigue and try to make wise mouth choices... tired mamas can be grumpy mamas with short fuses.

And I look at our new grass and I am hopeful.

A soaking sleep. Perhaps that's all it will take for this crispy, dry brain to green up again.

{Saturday's note: It was with much amusement that I looked again at the title of this post and realized that I seem to feel I am simultaneously in a drought and surfing a sea. Mix metaphors much? Creaky ol' brain!}

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