We are not sleeping in the Puklich household these days. These days? More like these months…these last long 10 months. Mr. Finnegan is really testing mom and dad’s capacity for selfless, unconditional love and patience. Okay, maybe that is an exaggeration; we will love our children through anything thick or thin. But right about now my grip on sanity is wearing just a tad thin from lack of sleep. It’s a good thing he’s so darn cute. And it’s also a good thing I can be completely reassured that by the time he’s 18 and we send him off to college he’ll probably be sleeping through the night, he’ll probably be sleeping in his own bed, and he probably won’t have to be nursed back to sleep every time he wakes up. Oh, and I’m sure he’ll be potty trained by then…and have all of his teefers.
I go through life not really realizing how sleep deprived and drained I am until something happens and it sort of slaps me in the face. That happened today. I was going to bring all the kids to the library because Kira got very upset this morning when Daddy returned her book to the library. I packed up all the kids and discovered when we got there that we still had 45 minutes before it opened. Finn had already fallen asleep in his car seat – little stinker – so I went through the drive-through Caribou in Excelsior to get some tea and decided to just drive for a bit to let the girls look at all the flowers, to let Finn finish his nap, and to waste time until the library opened.
So I’ve got my tea, I’m driving along, pointing out flowers like we do Christmas lights in the winter. In the winter when we see houses decorated with lots of pretty lights we yell, “Christmas on the left!” or “Christmas on the right!” Today it was “purple flowers on the right!” and “white flowers all over that huge tree on the left!” I’m driving along and I come to an intersection that I assume is a 4 way stop. Wrong, two way, and as I am going through the intersection I realize a car was going through the intersection and I missed it in my blind spot. CRASH. In slow motion I watch as the other car’s air bags engage and the car spins in a half circle. It really was a pretty soft bump and nobody was hurt. Thank the Benevolent Blissful Ever-present Divine Consciousness! Still, it was scary and jarring to be in fender bender, however small.
Nobody was hurt, the other driver was a super sweet woman who politely declined my offer of a lift after we had exchanged information 
Who can blame her? It’s most important that nobody was hurt. And as Blayne said, that’s why they call them accidents. But it makes you think. It could have been worse. And I’m slapping myself for being so tired and for not being more present in the uber important job of driving my kids around. Guilt, it’s such an ingrained part of parenting, isn’t it?
When will Finnegan start sleeping better aside from the fluke sleep through the night? (Hey, it happened once!) When will he start taking more than 1/2 hour naps? I can’t just wave a magic wand and make him sleep better. We can’t divine the future so I have no idea when things will get better. We just need to work through it with our son, I guess. Luckily Blayne is willing to be up just as much as I am. He’s such a good daddy and such trooper. We will continue trying to get him to sleep better, we will continue to be patient while he’s up fussing for two hours in the middle of the night. I’ll continue to nurse him and comfort him SEVERAL times a night. We’ll continue to take him into our bed even though we’d really like to reclaim it as adults only. What else can we do? Just love him, that’s what.
He is pretty darn cute, isn’t he?
