One of those nights (and days)

I'm a parent of two children (almost 4 years old and 20 months), and if you, too, are a parent, you can probably guess what kind of night I'm talking about. I'm sure I cursed myself by writing about sleep the other day, because now I'm running into problems with their sleep everywhere I turn.

Yesterday, I was coming home late from work and the plan was to load the kiddos in the car, turn right back around, and take them to our school's holiday dinner. So, for the first time in weeks, my older daughter takes a nap, and for the first time this week, the younger was napping a bit later in the day. So our wonderful nanny rousted them unhappily from their sleeping so that I could pack crying children into the car--and my oldest promptly stopped crying and got back to her nap for another 15 minutes.

Then last night, our sleeping arrangements with the girls got all jumbled up, as did their sleeping patterns. Our younger daughter has been either sleeping all night or waking once in the middle of the night and going back to sleep. Last night, she was waking up every couple hours and crying--she seemed to be saying that her feet and/or knees hurt, and rubbing one or the other did soothe her (eventually) each time. I checked for a fever and found none. There's a good chance that the actual problem had something to do with the fact that she only ate a little dinner, all of it cookies.

At one point, I got her back to sleep and then I couldn't. There was an owl hooting somewhere outside. I had Tim Minchin's "White Wine in the Sun" going through my head. I had other things on my mind. Maybe an hour later, I got back to sleep for another hour before it was time to get up.

Our older daughter was also restless last night, waking up a couple times and eventually getting some children's Advil/Tylenol/whatever from her mom. It was just one of those nights.