Soul Sister

No baby book will tell you this, so you're lucky to be hearing it from me:

Children sleep just to screw with you. It's in their constitution somewhere. I'm tired. My job is Daddy Day Care and I do it well, but unlike real day cares, there is no relief person. That means that I don't get to go on break, or take a lunch. The illusion that most people have is that children are small versions of humans. They eat, drink, run around and eventually sleep to replenish energy. Common mistake.

Children run on various forms of energy: Food, solar, nuclear and the souls of others. That last one is what mine is running on right now, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The child woke this morning and I fed her. We then began our day of singing songs, dancing, learning what things are and all the usual child-rearing stuff. Around noon, I started getting tired. Picking up a 28 lb weight over and over again, letting it fall on you, jump on your ribs and scream at you tends to tire a person out. She switched to solar power.

We played for another hour or so before I started running on fumes, so I closed the blinds and tried to put her to sleep. She switched to nuclear power. I got desperate and turned to the electronic babysitter (television) and let her watch Sesame Street while I attempted to make a sandwich. She didn't like that episode so she found me in the kitchen.

I gave up and decided to just go to the store and pick up something for dinner since she had no intentions of going to sleep. I got her dressed (A feat that would make an excellent challenge on American Gladiators) and then we were on our way to the store.  kept saying, "If she falls asleep, I'm turning around." Of course she fell asleep as we were walking in the store. I ran through that store like it was one of those shopping sprees on TV. In and out in under two minutes. I damned-near ran home. It took me 5 minutes to go 10 blocks uphill carrying bags and pushing a stroller. Add that to the two minutes that we were in the store and she slept a total of seven minutes.

Why did she wake up as soon as I put the key in the door? I know I didn't make any noise. I did it so slow and meticulously that you would've thought I was disarming a bomb or something. Strollers and car seats are like those external cell phone battery boosters. You know, the ones that charge the battery in like two minutes. You can be gone seven minutes or seven hours. It doesn't matter;The minute you bring that kid back in the house, they're gonna wake up.

So that brings me back to my original point: She's gone from food to solar to nuclear and now she's feeding of the souls of others...me.