God Bless Coffee

In the past I've made mention that wine was specifically designed for consumption by parents needing to unwind. Now, I'm also going to claim that coffee was designed specifically for parents needing to drag through a day after their kids kept them up the whole night before. True, there are many people in the world who have no kids and enjoy both coffee and wine regularly, but the appreciation level is what's lacking. Those young whipper snappers get their soy ginger latte to recover from studying all night for mid-terms, we parents need it because we laid in bed for 8 hours listening to one year olds scream in an oddly impressive harmony, then had to get up and function at work. So while the pledges over at Theta Nu are enjoying a double foam peppermint mocha with a pumpernickel scone to nurse their hangover from last nights kegger, I literally need the quadruple shot espresso coursing through my veins at the moment to simply keep my eye lids from cementing together and my head from permanently affixing to my keyboard. It all started when we were decided to go to bed "early" last night. I was picking up the toy graveyard that our kitchen turns in to during the course of the night and I pushed the girls chairs back in against our dining room table. Well, the damn cat was sitting under the chair and got spooked, jumped out and latched on to a metal (fortunately empty) wine rack and brought it crashing back down. As the dust settled and I clenched every fiber in my body to avoid skinning the fur ball alive I listened for the expected shrieks of waking babes. Oddly there was nothing so a few tense moments later we continued prepping the house for bed. We then went in to do our final check on the girls and as Gina creaked the door open she locked eyes with Arianna who was sitting in a dazed stupor, probably trying to go back to sleep from the cat/wine rack fiasco. Of course, upon seeing mom she started crying which woke up Genevieve and the night began. We spent the next two hours with the girls crying, quieting, crying again, quieting, crying again, quieting. Every time we would make a move toward the door to settle them they'd quiet before we got there and (assumably) go back to sleep. By the time we laid back down ourselves, though, someone would start crying again. We were like tennis balls in a Federer - Nadal match; to the door, returned to the room, to the door, returned to the room, lob to the door, smashed to the room by Federer, great return by Nadal to the door. Finally we just went in, picked everyone up, got them some cold water and rocked them for a while (it sucks to be the dad in this situation when there's only one rocking chair - 30 pound baby gets heavy real fast at 12am). They seemed to settle a little bit after this, but sure enough not long later we were back up again. I managed to squeeze in a precious few minutes of sleep before the 5:30 alarm but I know Gina got less because every time I woke up she was already awake, propped up and listening with a pained look on her face. We both have concerns over these situations but she takes it personally, like the girls are judging her because she doesn't have an answer for the situation. As I was getting ready in the dark this morning she sat up, awakening from one of her brief moments of sleep and asked if anyone was crying while I was in the shower. Even when asleep she still was dreaming about them crying. So this morning, as I drive in through the morning fog, it wasn't the usual question of "should I stop for coffee on the way in", it was "where" and "how big".