Sawing Logs and Finding Hobbits

Today was not my most flattering of mommy days--or, to be honest, any sort of days. By that, I mean I felt like an exhausted basket case from the time my day started, at 5:30 AM. That’s right--5:30 AM. With a newborn, I would’ve been jumping up and down and doing cartwheels in the living room. With an 18-month-old, and a job that keeps me up until 12:30 or 1:00 most nights, not so much.

After begging my child for over an hour to go back to sleep, I finally plopped him down on the couch in front of Curious George, and groggily trudged back to the bathroom to take a shower.

After I got finished with a meeting, I picked the little one up from Bible school and it was time for the gloriousness of Wednesday naps.

Never has there existed such a magnificent nap as the Wednesday nap. It is one that I can count on. After Bible school, the little one is always completely exhausted. He usually naps for at least three hours--three hours that this momma gets to clean the house, do lots of work, put away laundry, and get started on dinner.

Based on how our day started off, I thought for sure this nap would be even longer than usual. How very wrong I was.

I carried my son into the house (I even kicked off my boots to be extra quiet), tiptoed back to his room, and gently laid him down. Instantly, his eyes shot open and bloodcurdling screaming ensued.

Super.

At this point, I wanted to rupture my own eardrums, rip every individual hair out of my head, and save my eyeballs so that I could sit down and sob. (So dramatic, I know, but you know how everything feels end-of-the-world awful when you’re exhausted?)

So I did what any sane mother would do: I crawled into my son’s crib, explained that it was nap time, and that he was going to sleep. For ninety minutes, I tried to sleep in my son’s crib while he hopped up and down, crawled all over me, talked to himself, and (twice) sat on my face. I would’ve left after five minutes except that I literally lacked the energy to move. I just kept saying over and over, “Hush. It’s nap time. If you don’t lie down and be quiet, Momma is going to go bye-bye.” And finally, it worked. It must have, because I woke up an hour later with horrible back pain and a sleeping toddler curled up next to me.

Praise the Lord.

Now for the hard part: the escape. In case you’re not the variety of mom that takes the risk of crawling into a crib with your child, I can let you know that it’s no easy thing to get out of. There were lots of desperate prayers, lots of near muscle-pulling maneuvers, and finally I was out! I felt victorious!( Also, I felt like Spider Man.)

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I closed the door to my son’s room, breathed a sigh of relief, and then instead of going right to work like I should have, I made a decision that I never, ever make: to take a nap. It was imperative that I slept. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so grumpy as I was this afternoon. So at 2:15, I turned on the monitor, changed into my pajamas, and took a nap. And what a nap it was. My husband got home from the hospital early, and came in at 4:45. He walked into the bedroom and woke me up.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

I replied with some garbled form of, “Huh?”

“Are you sick? You look sick,” he said.

I replied with some garbled form of, “No.”

He took one look at me, told me to keep sleeping, unplugged the monitor, and took it to his office.

That’s right, my son and I both napped for over four hours today.

After we both woke up around 5:45, I made the decision that it was a pizza night. No way was I going to be cooking anything at all. We dined on pizza, the hubs and the little one ran around the house playing, and I’m pretty sure I walked around like a zombie. Not exactly the typical morning/day/evening in my household, but whatever. I finally found my energy around 7:00.

As the hubs was bathing the toddler, I was getting everything ready to put the little one down. I got out his pull-up, his Razorback pajamas, and as I walked over to the bookshelf to select our nighttime story, I decided to try something different. I grabbed a back-up book and hid it behind the pillow on his armchair.

Lately, I have been reading longer and longer books to the toddler. I’ve started reading very slowly to see if he would get anxious, or if he would enjoy the story. He seemed to truly be doing the latter. So, I decided I was going to try to read a book without any pictures. I walked to the office, opened the closet door, and rummaged through all our stacks of novels. And I found it:

The Hobbit.

Of course . Of course. The Hobbit.

I didn’t think that there was any way he would sit through it. I don’t have a nice, illustrated version of the book; I have a raggedy paperback that I’ve probably read ten times.

So, after getting ready for bed, he crawled in my lap and I began, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort.”

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And I found myself reading and reading and reading--reading about hobbits, and the past adventures of the Tooks, and the encounter with Gandalf, and then all the dwarves crowding in for tea. And he was soaking it up--hanging on every word. I was in Heaven, really. Finally, at the very bottom of page 13, after I’d been reading for about 25 minutes, and when he could barely keep his eyes open, he murmured, “Night, night.”

I turned out the light and rocked my angel, smelling his hair and hugging him tightly. All day long, I had felt exhausted and grumpy. I had been short and snippy; and here I was, soaking up the fact that I had just read the first 13 pages of a very famous novel to my 18-month old, and singing to him our usual montage of bedtime songs.

I learned a few things today. I learned that even if my body feels like it’s been through the washing machine, it’s worth it to snuggle in a little crib with my son for two-and-a-half hours. I learned that although I’d been snippy-snappy all day, my son still adored me and wanted to read a bedtime story. And I learned that it is foolish to assume my child is incapable of something without trying it out first.

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something.”

Indeed.