Good and bad reasons to have nothing to say

I got three hours of sleep last night. The night also included a 70-minute "discussion" with my daughter where I told her to lie down and she screamed at me.

And this is now on my ipod.

Talk to you tomorrow...

Yoga v. Sleep, Round Two

I mentioned last week that in trying to make peace with Rylee getting up at 6:30 I decided to start taking an 8:15 yoga class twice a week. To make that class we need to leave by 7:45. Here's how that went today...

5:30 am - Rylee wakes up for the first time, I put her back in bed
5:50 am - Rylee wakes up for the second time, I put her back in bed
6:10 am - Rylee wakes up for the third time, I put her back in bed
6:30 am - Rylee wakes up and since it's officially her morning I pull her into bed with me for a quick snuggle. Monday at 6:30 I was desperate for her to snuggle for even 15 minutes so I could be prone for just a little while longer. She lasted 5 minutes. Today at 6:30 she promptly fell sound asleep. Sound. Asleep. Oh, and did I mention on my arm?

6:50 am - I decide to extricate (successfully) but now I can't pack my gym bag or get dressed. But I can pack her a to-go breakfast and get her clothing out so I do that.

7:30 am - She's still asleep. I get my gym clothes and pack my bag without waking her. Dither, dither, dither, what to do?
7:40 am - She's still asleep! This would be a dream any other day. Ok, I decide to call this one for sleep but now she's slept so long that if I want to get a shower I'm going to have to be swift and silent. To keep the dogs from waking her up I decide to shut the bedroom door. I forget I live in an old house. So that goes about like this: "CREEEEAAAAAAAAK...Mommy!" She wakes up happy and I'm thankful for small favors.
7:43 am - Decide to go for it. Worst case I'll be too late for class but can still hit some piece of equipment and get a shower.
7:53 am - Pulling out of the driveway with a dressed baby who is munching on her to-go breakfast. That cuts drop-off time to two minutes, but if I carry her rather than let her walk in I can maybe still make it.

It's worth mentioning at this point that the area around my house currently looks about like this:

So to get anywhere I've got a few nasty intersections to get through. There's literally less than a lane in each direction. Two very narrow partial lanes are all that is available, one in each direction. Today that proved to be more exciting than usual!

See those two little cars at the top of the drawing? I'm in the one headed in the proper direction. At the entrance of these little traffic cone lanes there are signs that look like this.

I'm pretty certain that the sign the woman in the top, left-hand car saw does NOT look like this:

In her defense the traffic pattern has only been like this for about five months. But narrowly avoiding a head-on collision is good for my heart rate, right?

Having survived near-death Rylee and I are still on track to make it to the gym with about a minute to spare. Slamming on my brakes in the above scenario did fling her fruit mash-up onto the floor, but she still has dry cereal and milk to last her until the next red light. And please - feel free to cut-and-paste that breakfast description into any letters to the nominating committee for Mother of the Year.

For reasons best known to herself, Rylee has a little tantrum and flings her cereal all over the car. She then asks for cheese as we are just about to turn into the parking lot. She's not allowed to have any food there so I'm hoping she will finish her cheese at her usual quick pace. She doesn't.

I scramble into the gym, now already a few minutes late for class. The childcare workers inform me she'll have to stand in the hallway to eat her cheese. But they're willing to stand there with her so I can get to class. In the cooler light of now I'm blessing them for that but at the time I was irrationally irritated with Yet Another Hassle.

Zip down the hall, four minutes late for class. And so flustered that for most of the class I'm about like this:

Ohm well.

Hoisted by my own petard ... almost

I didn't know prior to googling for a picture of a petard that one is hoisted by it by having it blow up in one's face. Learn something new every day.

As I wrote about yesterday I finally was desperate enough to throw good decor aside and tack Rylee's curtains down. The results so far are mixed.

Discard as irrelevant to my blocking-the-dawn experiment her awakening at 11:15 pm and 5:45 am. Both times she went back down within five minutes. Night wakings are thankfully no longer the norm, but they aren't rare either. And after hatching the plot to make blackout curtains and because I am crafty I always tell her "It's still nighttime. Time for sleep." when I put her back into her crib.

After going back to sleep at 5:45 she woke up again at 6:15. This is when I decide to see if the curtains that are obviously worthless for getting her to sleep to a reasonable hour at a single stretch might be enough to convince her that it's the middle of the night. I tell her it's nighttime, time for sleep, put her in the crib, leave the room, hold my breath and say a little prayer. Silence. More silence. This is good.

Now last week I decided to make lemons out of my lemonade and started going to an 8:15 yoga class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I need to leave the house at 7:45 to allow 20 minutes driving time, 5 minutes wrangling into the car and 5 minutes wrangling out of the car into the childcare. If I want some zen zoning out prior to class I need to leave even earlier. This class guarantees me some yoga during the week since my plan to get up at 6 to do yoga and shower before she gets up at 7 was shot to heck by her getting up way before then.

Back to this morning. After nothing but silence comes out of the room for a good five minutes I think, Good. Now she'll sleep another hour or so and we'll still make it to yoga. There's no way she can possibly sleep late enough for me to miss my class.  Isn't that cute, what I thought there just then? How precious is an inexperienced mommy.

7:15 rolls around to still more silence. But rather than admit defeat I start packing a to-go breakfast and praying that she gets up by 7:30 so that I don't have to commit the horrible act of waking up the child who doesn't sleep. For extra insurance I make a little noise.

So does this long story have a happy ending? It does! She woke up at 7:30 and with lightening quickness I slammed her into her clothes and into the car. Made it with five minutes to spare. Rock on.

The actions of a desperate woman

After the initial success of Rylee's new black out curtains, which lasted about a week, she's been gradually moving her wake-up time back earlier and earlier so that as of yesterday we were back to 6:15. It doesn't sound that much different from 7:00 but the extra 30-45 minutes really makes a big difference to my sanity.

Yesterday I bought some pushpins and pinned the sides and the bottoms of the curtains to the wall. Light had been seeping in the edges and bottom and with an earlier and earlier Arizona dawn I think it might have made a difference. It's now dark as a tomb in there, not to mention so fashionable and ready for House Beautiful!

This morning she woke up at 5:50 and I put her back down and she slept until just after 7. Then she took a 2.5 hour nap. Her usual is 1.5 - 2 hours. She didn't nap yesterday so that may have contributed. But I'm crossing my fingers again that this time the curtains will work.

Statistics

Time: 6:58 AM
Number of minutes I've been awake: 96
Number of hours I slept: 5.5
Number of minutes Rylee's been awake: 57
Number of hours Rylee slept: 9
Number of hours she needs: 10.5
Number of wardrobe changes in those 57 minutes: 2
Ounces of water dumped on floor and chair: 12
Number of times Rylee has hit me: 4
Number of times I've hit Rylee: 0 (just to be clear)
Number of times I've said: "You're driving me crazy!": 1 
Hours left in the day: 8475923874329871298347

Optimism, Reconciliation and Revelation

Optimism
Last night was the grand deployment of Rylee's new curtains. I choose to ignore the fact that she got up twice around 1 AM since it was dark at the time and she probably would have done that anyway. She woke up at 6 AM, squawked a few times and went soundly back to sleep until 7 AM. The household has adopted a position of cautious optimism.

Reconciliation 
I tried on the first skirt draft again and got Eric's opinion on it. He likes it as it is, but we both agree I should wear a shirt over it rather than tucked in. I had it tucked in to evaluate the waistband, but it's not how I would actually wear it. And I've reconciled myself to the dimensions. They are correct if horrifying. I think the only real problem is the small open part at the waistband from the zipper seam allowance being too big.  I'm going to sew another one from my cheap black twill and fix the zipper problem. If I like the look of that draft then I'll be cutting into my real fabric to try to make the March 20th deadline.

Revelation
The big reveal of the fabric I chose for the skirt! This was tough and I'm still not sure if I got it right. It might be too busy for a skirt, but it's so lovely I think it will work with a simple solid top. Happily, my "practice" knit fabric just happens to include solids to match this twill. If that's still too busy, I'll re-work it into something for Rylee or a dust rag or a diaper case or hat for the dog or something.

Amy Butler Nigella Twill Passion Vine Grey

Yummy. It's a 100% cotton, medium-weight twill. The hand is buttery soft. It's just lovely. It's softer than my practice twill, so the drape will probably be even prettier. I got two yards so I could play with the mother/daughter outfit idea. I was thinking maybe a jumper for Rylee, but that's a post for another day.

I iz dum

Rylee has been getting up at 

(actually earlier, but pictures from that time are all black).

This makes her

and me

Not a great combo. Today I finally got a chance to sew the blackout curtains that I am praying will help. I couldn't last night because, well, Lost was on. And some things are more important than sleep.

Well, the lack of sleep also clearly makes me

only with darker hair.

Upon unpacking the lovely plaid fabric from yesterday's happy package I discover I have just enough fabric to sew the curtains. Clearly I made a mistake somewhere because I never get just enough fabric for any project. Usually it's at least 1.5 x (just enough fabric). But the amount is still workable. I have enough to make the hang tabs, but I have to make them with less fabric than I prefer which requires precision ironing instead of lazy ironing. 

I then discover that I should really write things down when I'm this tired and befuddled, because even after carefully (I thought) measuring the fabric I still end up with one curtain that is significantly longer than the other. And because of the way I sewed in the liner (*) I have to do some difficult fiddling to get them the same length. The blackout liner is heavy and that makes the fiddling and manipulating that much harder. 

A good 15 minutes spent alternately getting the logic and then the arithmetic wrong before I finally manage to get the tabs nicely spaced and sewn on.  

And after fretting that they would be too short because of the fabric mistake they are at least four inches below the bottom of the window. All my mistakes added up together to make the finished product what I wanted in the first place. Serendipitous stupidity sums spectacularly. Or something.   

So here's hoping.

Finished product, ready for Little Miss to dream sweet dreams until morning. Please. Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease. 

And here's a bonus of a goofball who wandered in and noticed me using the flash and so of course immediately started vogueing. 

(*) Because of the plastic coating the liner can only be sewn as part of a fabric "sandwich." Otherwise it just won't move through the machine. I had planned to sew it about 1" from the top on both sides and use that to line up the upper hem. But when I discovered that I couldn't sew it that easily I folded over one edge of the side to make the "sandwich." Since I was too lazy and dum to pin at that point it sewed in a little crooked. So lining up the hems was harder than it needed to be.  It was also at this point that I pitched the idea of doing a tutorial.