Whose was the brilliant mind that thought a 3x per day medicine for a child was a good thing? I ponder this as I try to stay awake until midnight so my daughter can have her dose of amoxicillin to fight the fever and miscellaneous other symptoms she has acquired. While I normally have difficulty falling asleep before midnight, the act of trying to stay up makes me very sleepy. You see, these late night tasks are usually the responsibility of my night-owl husband. Even when the kids were babies and the late-night feeding called, he would stay awake late and bottle feed so that I could get a decent length of sleep. Now managing the midnight dosage falls squarely to me and I don’t like it.

The first night was okay; the promise of a respite to her symptoms made it easy to stay up. Afterwards, I rocked her in the chair that we had put many miles on when she was a baby. I even felt a kind of déjà vu when I pondered that the last time I remembered rocking my daughter like this was when she first came home from the hospital ... and my husband was away on a deployment. He soon came home to meet his new baby girl.

There is a blessing there, when that perpetual motion machine of a child slows down into the baby that she still so much is. So I will try hard to stay awake. I’ll write my postings. I’ll fold the laundry. I’ll knit and catch up on my reading. But I won’t pluck my eyebrows after 10:30pm again (don’t ask).