Sleep Tight Sleeping Beauty

Dear Prince Charming,

Do not lean over my sleeping body.  Take those princely lips and run along.  Do not dare plant them anywhere near my reposed face.  Can’t you see that I am finally catching up on my sleep?   Why don’t you go away, fight some dragons or something. You can come back in about a hundred years.  Maybe then I’ll be in the mood for something other than sleep.

Oh how quickly one forgets.  How easily I colored the past with the Technicolor brushstrokes of babyhood.  Indelibly etched in my brain is the delicious scent of my babies’ necks.  My fingers remember vividly the impossibly smooth skin of their silky backs.  My arms still bounce with the sighing lump nestled deep in blankets in my arms.

Hang on there, Princie.  I know what you're thinking, and you can forget it. Sure I’ve been pining for those days, aching to hold a baby once again, but I am over it now.  You see, I’ve had a chance to think about it (what with my being awake so much lately) and I’m not looking to rock another cradle.  I’ve got it pretty good.  My princesses sleep through the night. They pee by themselves and they dress themselves and they read to themselves.  So rarely do they come in for a morning snuggle that I leap at the chance to desert sleep for their warm hugs.

Funny how it goes.  The sweet moments of those infant days shine so brightly in my mind, but the sleepless nights? They did not get crystallized quite as intensely.

But now I remember.  Oh yes, I remember it all. Because I spent the past two weekends sharing my castle with babies.  Sweet, sweet babies who cooed and snuggled and grinned toothless grins and DIDN’T SLEEP A FREAKING WINK.

And when I don’t sleep, I transform.  Poof! In a billow of purple and black smoke this lovely beauty morphs into a beastly evil queen.  I can’t help it.  It’s some sort of spell that gets activated when my eyes droop down below my chin.

It's the babies.  So darn cute, so darn needy. I am exhausted. My nerves are shot.  I need more coffee.  I need more hands.  I need to get out of here.  But what I don’t need, your Highness, is your sweet kiss dragging my ragged body out of a deep and blissful sleep.

Why don’t you just move along? I hear that pretty young thing living with seven guys in the cabin in the woods has always got a song in her heart.

Trust me, that’s the better deal.  All I’m offering is this very shiny, very red apple.

Sincerely,

Sleeping Beauty

This is an original post to Rocky Mountain Moms Blog.  If Daphne, aka Sleeping Beauty, ever catches up on her sleep, she will resume her crusade of chronicling the green thing at her site,  A Greener Biener.