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Phoebe slept for a four-hour stretch tonight before I couldn't hack it anymore and woke her up. 

And I wonder why my children struggle to sleep.

In my defense, she's been sleeping terribly since having COVID and my milk supply is not used to such a long stretch of sleep. And also she fell down the stairs earlier today so I was stressed out about her long stretch of sleep for that reason, as well.

Before anyone gets too worried, she didn't fall down the whole flight of stairs. Only, like, three. 

And it was all Alexander's fault, which he readily admitted before she even hit the ground.

Granted, she shouldn't have been climbing the stairs in the first place.

But a whole lot of thing happened all at once...

I had gone upstairs to put a few things away (a never-ending story in this house) and on my way to do that I begged my children to please finally put away their unmentionables. They had put away all the rest of their clean clothes—their shirts, their pants, their pyjamas—but for some reason they stopped short of putting away their socks and underwear. 

Andrew moved their socks and underwear to the stairs to nudge the children into remembering to put away such things. But the children remained un-nudged. 

So, I nagged them. And they miraculously came to find the last bits of their laundry. 

And thus the baby gate was open. And there were multiple children on the stairs—Zoë and Alex and...Phoebe. I was trying to pick my way down the stairs to retrieve Phoebe before she got into too perilous of a situation when Alexander noticed that Phoebe had found a pair of his socks. 

Despite the multiple pairs of underwear he'd scattered on various steps, Alexander decided it was paramount that he should obtain the exact pair of socks Phoebe was holding. And so he started a tussle over this pair of socks. He yanked, Phoebe yanked, he yanked and...*ping*...the socks flew out of Phoebe's grip and Phoebe, well, Phoebe went flying off the stairs. 

"I'M SORRY!" Alexander blurted out. 

And then *smack*! 

Phoebe landed on the, uh, landing.

She started howling. 

I finished running down the stairs to pick her up. Alexander finished running up the stairs to cry in his room. Zoë stood in the middle of the stairs, rather confused by everything that just happened (and got in the way of both of us).

I definitely yelled. 

I definitely used the phrase "stinking-stanking kids!" 

So I guess you could say things were pretty intense. But, we all cooled down. Alexander and I had a good chat about when and when not to yank things out of his sister's hands. And Phoebe seems fine.

Except that now it's 3:33 AM and we're just...up...because I was too nervous to just let her sleep. 

And tomorrow is going to be so much fun.