"I've made a huge mistake"

As emotionally exhausted as I was from this week (and despite having a lot of reading and writing to do), Andrew encouraged me to go to bed around 8:30 this evening, shortly after I finished reading bedtime stories to Alexander and Phoebe...and subsequently fell asleep on the couch after they skipped off to roast marshmallows with Daddy.

Here's the thing—it's Friday night! And Miriam's birthday! 

And although we decided to hold off on celebrating as a family (because (a) neither Rachel nor I had time to put a cake together this week and (b) the girls invited friends over so we'd have to rush through our family stuff and I don't like rushing through family stuff) the girls did plan a little fire pit/game/movie night with their friends. 

In a brilliant move, the mother of one of the girls' friends invited Benjamin and Zoë to hang out at their house with their pre/teens, so those two weren't feeling left out.

But Alexander and Phoebe kind of were. 

We had intended to get outside and let them roast some marshmallows before coming in for bedtime, but one thing led to another, and then it was too late to go out to roast marshmallows because the teenagers had moved on to other activities and we didn't want to interrupt. So instead Andrew got out our little "table fire" thingy (which Alexander was a little afraid of because the last time we used it he grabbed the grate without realizing it was hot and burned his poor little hand so badly; fortunately future problems are easily prevented by remembering that everything about this production is hot) and roasted marshmallows inside with those two. 

And I fell asleep on the couch and was subsequently put to bed at the same time as Phoebe. 

When I protested, Andrew said, "But doesn't 12 hours of sleep sound glorious?"

Now, that's true. 12 hours of sleep does sound glorious, but as tired as I am theoretically...my body is also used to getting up and going after five hours of sleep or so. And that's typically five hours of interrupted sleep because Phoebe still doesn't sleep through the night consistently.

Anyway, around 2 AM my body and brain were like, "Time to start another day!"

Turns out going to bed at 8:30 was a "huge mistake."

So I got up—and took a melatonin—and read an article that wasn't on my list of things to read, but which felt important to read anyway, and about half of another article, and did Duolingo, made some edits to my mom's paper, and now I'm finally feeling like I could maybe fall back asleep, so perhaps I'll try it.