Wow. I took a bit of a break there.
Out of necessity, definitely, because there was a school vacation mixed in there.
But can I tell you the real reason why I have been absent from the blog?
Well, let’s hop into the way-back machine for a bit. When I started our blog in 2021, I did it to follow my New Year’s Resolution of buying no clothes in that year. I also wanted to challenge myself to see if I would have enough worthwhile things to say to fill up a few pages on the great big book that is human history.
The verdict is still out on that last one, but what is for sure, is that I got through that year of no shopping and learned a ton of interesting things along the way.
As for the process? Well, I was getting up at 4:00AM not necessarily because I liked to wake up at, as my children call it, “the butt crack of dawn”, (I’m not smiling, BTW.), but because my youngest child was a terrible sleeper and had been waking up, since 2019, between 4:30-5:00AM. The only way I could have even a few minutes to myself to think during the day (since he wasn’t in school yet at the time), was to wake up at the aforementioned cleft in the rear end of dawn.
I was writing like my life depended on it during the few minutes I had to do so. And I wrote a lot.
So, buckle up, folks, we are landing back in the present day… okay. The weather on the ground is snowy, windy and cold, don’t forget your earmuffs!
Something incredible happened the week before the winter vacation, which just ended.
The week before the winter break, my youngest child, the one who was my impetus for getting up before dawn, fell ill.
But not really feverish. He just was tired. Now, keep in mind, he has been saying for 4 years that he is tired. And we have been saying to him, “if you would just wake up later, you wouldn’t be so tired anymore.” But that went unheard.
Until his body caught up to him. It started on a Wednesday afternoon after school, when he said he was going to go read books in his room. I didn’t hear from him after a ten minutes or so, so I went to check up on him. He was asleep...and he was incredibly pale. Took his temperature. It was maybe a little high, but nothing I would ever be worried about.
He slept all afternoon. My indulgent husband warned me that he would be up before 4:00AM if I let him sleep, but I couldn’t bring myself to wake him up.
He proceeded to sleep all night and into the next morning. He wasn’t up before 7:00AM. And after breakfast, he complained that he was still tired and wanted to go back to sleep. I excused him from school, and then tried urgently to find someone who could stay with him while I took the big kid to school.
The person who I found was a wonderful woman from our Small Group, which meets at our house on Saturday mornings. She is retired, and literally at 10 minutes notice, she was ringing the doorbell, ready to watch the little guy in case he woke up. I will never stop being grateful for having people who love us like family and who will drop anything to help us out.
He slept all day.
On that Friday, the last day of school before the break, he insisted that he wanted to go to school because the school was celebrating Carnaval, (a kind of Halloween-y costumed parade), and he wanted to go as Spiderman. His brother had originally planned to go as Joe Biden, but then changed his mind and went as James Bond instead. (See photo above!)
Most of the day on Saturday he slept. Sunday, he slept. By Monday, his temperature was completely normal, he was just tired. He went to school, slept at lunchtime and after school.
Now, am I a horrible human being for sending him to school? Maybe I am. But he held it together amazingly well, and he was not sick. No sniffles, no cough, no fever.
In the depths of my heart, I had been praying for years that this child’s biological clock get reset. That he would finally start sleeping normally. And I had a sixth sense that this was what was happening. He continued napping like an adolescent for a whole week.
Well. Let me tell you. He has slept past his wakeup time every day since, and he has not once in three weeks said the words, “I’m tired.” He talks like he is two years older and he grew an inch to boot. Something happened during that week that the child slept nonstop.
But what does this have to do with writing, Lily Fields?
It means that I have gotten a little lazy, if by lazy you mean I have stopped getting up at 4:00AM, which was my designated time to write!
I can actually put my finger down on a date on the calendar when a new season of my life started. It’s not really very often that we get to do that…it often happens so gradually. But I know exactly when my baby started growing up, and when I was able to start living like a normal person.
It’s bittersweet, though. I really enjoyed those frantic moments alone writing on the couch. Without the urgency, it’s harder to motivate myself. But we will figure this out.
I have so so so much more to tell you, but this one little miracle is what I wanted to tell you about today.
Sing With Your Feet 