Karin pulled a melodrama queen evening, flinging herself about with over-the-top declarations of the impossibility of slumber. She CAN’T close her eyes. She CAN’T go to sleep. She CAN’T stay in her bed. I’m so tempted to find a pacifier and stick it in her face, it’s not even funny. Anders thinks she’ll get over this pretty quick once she’s back on a regular schedule with daycare and too tired to do this kind of thing every night, but I have my doubts. It’s like she has to test every boundary and go in the opposite direction of everything we say, just BECAUSE.
He sat with her, I sat with her, he sat with her again, and we were both at our wit’s end when she finally dropped off, well after 11 p.m.. Later, lying in bed staring at the ceiling, I said, “I don’t want to be the parent of Karin the teenager.” Anders said, “Why do you have to think about that now?!” and I thought: for the same reason I had to think about my father dying before he actually did, so that it wouldn’t kill me when it finally happened.
I couldn’t get my brain to shut off and it took forever to fall asleep. At 5:41 a.m. I awoke to Karin crying, getting progressively louder with every passing second of no response. Anders got up to see what was the matter and she had just woken up and couldn’t get back to sleep. He was with her for an amazingly short time before returning to bed, but I haven’t been able to get back to sleep and after an hour of tossing and turning, decided to get up and write about it, in the hopes of exorcising the demon hamster in my brain that won’t stop running, running, running on its pretty little treadmill.
***
I’ve been doing crossword puzzles on and off since my mom left. My family has always been a fairly heavy crossword-solving family, and my sister and mom are addicts. I’ve gotten totally out of the habit, since Swedish crosswords are a pale shadow of a REAL crossword and my access to really good ones is minimal. When I was pregnant, my mom brought me some of those big crossword complilations (SUPER CROSSWORD BOOK!) but since then they’ve been languishing on the shelf, and only come off again in conjunction with her visits. I think it drove both Anders and my brother crazy during Christmas because my mom would sit and do a crossword and constantly read the clues out loud so that I (or whoever was in the room) could call out answers. We were like a tandem crossword team. She’d get stuck and then I’d work on it, or I’d start one and get stuck and she’d take over. I’ve been doing them ever since, although I suspect the craze is dying out slowly again, because it really is much more fun to do them with my sister and/or mother in the room.
One of the crosswords I was working on while sitting in Karin’s room telling her to shut her eyes, be quiet, put her head down, go to SLEEP had a neat gimmick which I’m putting here so I’ll remember it and possibly amuse you at the same time. It took me only a few minutes to figure out the solution and then I was quite taken with the cleverness of it. The headline was DECIPHER DECIPHER and here are the clues:
- Make the media melancholy
- Create a billboard
- Want an audience with the king
- Abhor the audition
- Specify the penalty
- Make fun of an F
- Ridicule the roller coaster
- Write a musical symbol
- Overrun an Olympic event
- Crumple an application
- Make the media melancholy: DEPRESS DEPRESS
- Create a billboard: DESIGN DESIGN
- Want an audience with the king: DESIRE DESIRE
- Abhor the audition: DETEST DETEST
- Specify the penalty: DEFINE DEFINE
- Make fun of an F: DEGRADE DEGRADE
- Ridicule the roller coaster: DERIDE DERIDE
- Write a musical symbol: DENOTE DENOTE
- Overrun an Olympic event: DELUGE DELUGE
- Crumple an application: DEFORM DEFORM
And now I am going to go back to bed and try and sleep another hour or so.