Other Parents

One would think that other parents would be your most forgiving allies in the parenting journey, and sometimes they are.

Other times, not so much.

Those other times are when your neighbors, who are also parents of a two-year-old, have friends over for a backyard fire and stay up making loads of noise until 1:00 in the morning, making it impossible for you to go to sleep at ten when your own two-year-old has gone to sleep. And you know full well that the most sleep you can possibly get, if the boy sleeps, is five hours. If you are very, very lucky. But you know that the odds of this are small, as he has only slept through the night once in the past three weeks.

You go to bed at 1:00, when it is finally relatively quiet, and you can't get comfortable so you lie awake. At 1:45 when you are just about to maybe be able to relax enough so you might fall asleep, the boy wakes up. So you manage to get to sleep at around 2:15 or so. And then your uterus wakes you up at 5:15 with screaming cramps, so you get up and take some ibuprofen. But before you can get back to sleep, the boy wakes up and wants pillow. By the time he goes back to sleep, you are awake. Miserable, but awake.

So, no. I am not the best ally my neighbor parents could have today.