4:59AM

It is 6:07 Friday morning. I'm running away. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm gonna sleep when I get there. You can't make this shit up. First off, the "child" (and I use that term loosely) woke up Thursday morning around 9 AM. The only reason she woke up at 9 is because she went to sleep around midnight the night before (don't ask). So she woke up at 9. We began our broadcast day with some breakfast and a few songs for morning devotion: "I pledge allegiance to my daddy, the coolest mofo in America, and to his Republic, which isn't likely to stand. One daddy and a mommy, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Sometime after that we watched the Clockwork Orange shows on Disney Junior and then we went on our field trip down to the National Mall. I let her run free from the Tidal Basin all the way to the WWII memorial. We did a few laps around the Washington Monument and then ran up to the American History Museum where we looked at the big trains down in the basement and sat in the replica of the Chicago 'L' for a while watching the little movie on the wall. Then we ran all the way back to the car.

Two hours of that was enough to make me tired, but I'm old compared to her. She got home and ran around the house like the Tazmanian Devil that she is and pulled every doll, toy and mega block from its place and methodically laid them out on the floor like the little sharp pointy landmines that they are. Then she ate about $20 worth of groceries and bounced around the house some more. Other stuff happened that isn't interesting enough to write about, but was loud or destructive enough to etch across my soul and around eight o'clock when the normal two year olds of the world were winding down to go to bed, she was crushing up some No-Doz into a powder, spreading it out in a line on a mirror and snorting it through rolled up play money.

10PM came and went and she was still wide awake. The natural assumption is that she had a bunch of sugar or something throughout the day. Nope. She doesn't like sweets. Not cookies, not candy, not juice, not anything that would explain this nonstop energy that she has. She didn't have a long nap during the day. In fact, she didn't have a nap at all. She was up from 9AM until 1AM...taunting me. She's like Puffy. When she was a baby she used to hum, "I thought I told you that we won't stop, I thought I told you that we won't stop."

So anyway, around 1AM she figured that most of the clubs were closing and there was nothing else she could get into, so she went to sleep. Just to fuck with me, my wife gave me this false hope..."Since she went to sleep so late, you can probably bank on sleeping in tomorrow. There's no way she's gonna get up early." The devil is a liar.

4:59AM--I was dreaming that I was asleep. That's how tired I am these days. When other men are dreaming about God knows what (or who), I'm dreaming that I'm laying in a king-sized bed in a quiet soundproof room. So anyway at 4:59 my dream is brought to a halt by what I assume is the song that plays on the elevator ride down to hell:
"We're going on a trip in our favorite rocket ship, zooming through the sky. Little Einsteins!"

My daughter has an Eastern European Immigrant's grasp of the English language EXCEPT when it comes to one of those damned cartoons. Then, all of a sudden, she's an audio CD of Webster's Dictionary. At 4:59 and zero seconds she was standing in front of our bed singing that song. "We're going on a mission. Start the countdown! Five, four, three, two one!" (I'm thinking to myself, "If this isn't a dream, you're going on a mission to an adoption agency.")

If you read my posts often then you know that I have serious problems with insomnia. If I wake up, I'm up. My wife can go to sleep running up a mountain, so don't think I'm insensitive in this case, but while trying to keep my eyes closed and not wake up completely, I started kicking my wife. "Get up. She needs you. Where's your maternal instinct to protect? She's about to be placed into foster care. Save her!" My wife rolls over like she doesn't hear shit. My daughter starts lifting my eyelids. "We need you! Little Einstens, YEAH!"

At 5:01 AM and twelve seconds, I got up and kept repeating to myself "She's just a baby. She's just a baby." I walked her to the bathroom. She went. I tried to explain to her that it was 5 in the morning and that she'd only slept for four hours, but she wouldn't go back to sleep. So for the last hour or so we've been watching Little Einsteins and eating Cheerios. I've been keeping myself entertained with the thought of either running away or building a tree out of Mega Blocks and hanging myself from it.

...sigh