Monday, February 7, 2011

Let's play Distract the Duck!!!



Heres a fun game that anyone can play. Distract-a-Duck! Well I guess its more you can play as long as you have an Internet connection, a love of flights of fancy and/or juvenile and sarcastic sense of humor.

We are struggling with sleep over here on all fronts. Isla is experiencing something similar to night terrors every night and Mr. Colin is still struggling with the idea that his mommy will only feed him *gasp* 4 times between 7 and 6 am. This means that the adults in this house are spending many an hour gazing off into the middle distance and fondly (if not a little begrudgingly) remembering what sleep felt like. It also means that I am spending quite a bit of time being way too exhausted to actually
do anything but not able to nap. Napping as a parent when the children are awake has never lead to anything good in my experience. At best, you awake with a sense of dread and foreboding, completely missing the gleeful feeling of stolen rest, and at worst it means waking up to a bombed out house with various government services, well meaning family members and nosy neighbors tut-tutting "Those poor children, to have such a lazy, neglectful mother..."

So I have become an artist of finding easy, passive things to do that can keep me awake. When I mean easy I mean, nothing more strenuous or thought provoking then emptying the dishwasher. Scratch that, emptying the dishwasher completely at this point would cause me to pass out, lets say emptying the top rack of said dishwasher. Just the glasses, no bending over and no reaching required.

So far this is my list of things I can do within those parameters. Please leave me a few ideas of more 'activities' that can help keep me from falling over but not sucking the life out of what remains.

1) go through crayon boxes and picking out the broken ones.
2) dust only the things at waist height.
3) raise the blinds up and down
4) help Isla sort her stickers.
3) change my paper towel roll
4) search the Internet for funny Superbowl ads (thus my last post)
5) wipe down the remote controls
6) convince Isla to count every one of her horse figurines (there are twelve-ity seven if your interested)
7) takes the dogs collars off
8) watch listlessly as Isla uses her entire upper body as a stamp on her easel and then use it as a learning opportunity as to how sometimes our hands and faces turn and stay blue when we cover them in stamp ink.
8) survey the devastation that is the living room and make a mental list (promptly forgotten because duh, sleep deprivation) of all the lacking storage containers.
9) write long winded, poorly edited blog posts, although the poor editing sadly can't be blamed on sleep deprivation.

4 comments:

  1. - convince Isla to count her fingers, toes, mommy's fingers, toes, etc, etc.
    - give Isla a long long bath - she and her mess will be contained in the bathtub
    - show Isla how to wash the floor and pretend you compete with her. Sophia likes to win and if Isla is like Sophia, she would probably clean the whole floor and win.
    - of course there's always TV and computer. Not a preferred activity, but they will let you rest for a bit.

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  2. Coffee is my lifesaver. I'm a zombie before that first cup. Otherwise I find myself spending extraordinary amounts of time playing cityville & the like on facebook. Requires little thought or energy, and can be tended to in 1 minute opportunities while both kids are happy/amused.

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  3. Play with sharp objects and bazookas

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  4. @ Anonymous, I save the sharp objects and heavy weaponry for special occasions. Or else their play value is just wasted by over familiarity.

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