Wishing for sleep

Have you ever prepared for a big camping trip a month in advance? You've decided on all the things you need to get together, all the dependencies, all the fun plans for once you're there, all that fun stuff? You've outlined exactly what you'll need to buy, what you need to pack, what you need to dig out of that bleak corner of your crawl space? You outline a list of what needs to be done and assign each family member some things to do. Each week you check on the list and minimal progress has been done. Then the day before you're going camping, everybody goes into panic mode and you spend 20 hours getting everything together. Then you try to get some sleep in preparation for the big day and as you start drifting off, a high pitched squeal echoes through your house as your furnace implodes on itself (or at least the fan/blower portion of it). So, switching off the furnace for the night (it's been fairly warm lately) you return to bed to be waked up an hour later by your oldest boy who's having a bad dream (mostly it seems he's cold) so you cuddle with him for a bit to warm him up and comfort him, then send him back to bed with warmer blankets. As you try to sleep, your 1 year old sleeping with you squirms and fusses as she tries to get warm. And a couple of hours later, your middle child wakes up freezing and wiggles his way into bed with you, sleeping restlessly, but warm now. The bed is now a bit crowded, so after fighting with it, you wander out to sleep on the couch for the hour or so left of the night. About 30 minutes later, your oldest boy wakes up and decides it's time for a little Mr. Rogers. You slosh through breakfast and then around 8 you decide it's time to put the finishing touches on your monthly goals for the big accountability to come. As you do, you find that all of the stuff you had finally gotten together late the night before needs to be repacked, reorganized and resorted. So, you do that for a few hours, getting things in line literally minutes before the trip begins. Then you spend the next four hours sitting and sitting and sitting and sitting. With each passing moment, you see flashes of all the things that came together for this trip...all in all, things fell in place fairly nicely, but you're so tired and out of it that frankly, you couldn't much care. So after all that effort and all the coolness of the deliverables for the camping trip, you find yourself ready to just collapse and forget the whole thing...which is what you do.

And with that, I leave to commute home from my "camping trip." :)

Good night everybody.