Dear Child o’ Mine: Please, please, can I have one night of uninterrupted sleep? One night where I fall asleep and my eyes don’t open until the morning? One night where you get up and use the potty by yourself, or retrieve Hoot from the floor by yourself, or get a drink in the bathroom by yourself, or get a tissue from the box on your nightstand by yourself, or pull up your covers by yourself. Are you seeing the trend here? By yourself. Sans Mommy. I love you, daughter, with all my heart. But if I don’t get some friggin’ sleep Mommy is gonna get real crabby real soon.

Dear Darling Husband: I would like to know, have you been programmed since birth to be able to ignore the cry of the female human? Or is this a trait you’ve developed in adulthood, approximately five years ago? Do your ears simply not hear that particular frequency? You have two options for tonight: a.) you can sleep in her room so as to be sure to hear her call, or b.) we can duct-tape the baby monitor to your head, with the speaker positioned at your ear. Your choice.

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I learned yesterday that right after work is not the time to go to the gym. Because that’s when everyone goes to the gym. All treadmills were taken, and the only elliptical left was the wonky one where the “0” doesn’t work on the touchpad (thereby making it impossible to type in 30 minutes as your desired time, which means you type in 31 or 32 or 33 and get a LED reprimand from the machine that 30 minutes is the limit, you elliptical hog. Once I got past that and finally started exercising I realized that this was the machine where the flat panel TV turns itself off

every six to eight minutes. Right in the middle of heated debates on CNN where Republicans think we should amend/abolish the 14th Amendment so that children born in the U.S. are not automatically granted citizenship and we should be a country of exclusion even though the Founding Fathers thought otherwise, and Democrats say, in rebuttal, “Shut up you big stupidhead.” Gawd knows I don’t want to miss that.

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Zoe got busted this morning at school.

Since Tuesday’s arm fiasco, we’ve been providing quite a bit of help. She’s struggling to do everything not just one-armed, but left-handed to boot (she’s a righty). Poor baby. We help her get dressed, and undressed. We help her use the potty. We help her with her socks and shoes.

This morning, though, I talked to her teachers about how the day went yesterday (they were gone when I picked her up last night). Ms. Lisa said, “Oh, she did great! We had to help her with her shorts one time in the bathroom, but that was it!”

“You didn’t help her with the potty?”
“Nope.”

“She put her shoes on by herself?”
“Yep.”

Zoe slowly dragged her foot in a circle on the floor and looked at me mischievously out of the corner of her eye.

Right. Busted.