Similarities & Sleep Deprivation

Hayden and Davis are so very different, yet every so often I am reminded that they share many similarities.

Like clockwork, now that Davis is 3, he has started doing and saying the exact same things Hayden did and said when he was 3.

Example #1: We often watch the movie Garfield in the car on the way to school. Somewhere in the movie, one character tells another character to SHUT UP...

and at that very moment (and for the next five moments), you hear Davis say,

We don't say Shut Up, right Mom? Right?

Right.

We don't say Shut Up, right Hayden? Right? No! We don't say shut up!

Every passenger in the car must acknowledge that we don't, under any circumstances, say shut up. Except the one single circumstance where we are saying we don't say it. It's all a blur now, but it is a relief to know that somewhere between age 3 and age 5 this phase will end.

Example #2: For the last month or so, Davis has been waking up screaming out in agony that his legs hurt. We went through this same rigamarole about two years ago with Hayden and spent nearly a thousand dollars on x-rays and blood tests only to find out it was "growing pains." But hey, from a-glass-half-full-perspective, he now has the coolest item at school on the letter X day?

Anyway, last night was one of those nights for Davis.

I hurt to see him hurt, but when he is in pain, it is one of the few times he'll snuggle with me. We moved him into our room and I rocked him to sleep, cradling him like a baby. He laid on my chest and I felt his heart beat.

Even at 1:00 in the morning as I rubbed his legs I was able to savor the moment and appreciate how sweet and innocent he was.

How much he had grown in the last three years.

How I will not always be able to comfort him like this.

How I wish that one day he will have a wife that loves him as much as I do.

That bitter-sweet feeling lasted about 30 minutes and finally we both drifted to sleep.

And here is where it gets weird. A couple of hours later, he woke up with those pesky-achy*- growing-pains again. (*I can only assume they are pesky and achy. I never actually had growing pains. Which is a whole 'nother issue.)

Anyway, the second time he woke up, I was a bit less sentimental, and a tad more psychotic. I distinctly remember thinking that I should wake Jeff up and ask him to get a spoon so I could rub Davis' legs. With. A. Spoon! I even envisioned it in my head...rubbing the back-end of the spoon down his shin until the pain subsided.

Believe me, it makes less sense as I type it than it does as you read it. I have no idea Why (why!) in my sleepy foggy haze, I thought a spoon would have helped.

Maybe it's the Spoon Full of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down song from Mary Poppins that got me so off track?

Maybe it's because we were spooning each other?

Who Knows! The brain is a STRANGE, STRANGE thing!