Beep!

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Yeah, that’s what I heard around two o’clock this morning.

I knew right away that it was some kind of dying smoke detector somewhere.

And I had no interest in going to get it until I find it.

Because, you know, it’s such a pain to find.

Most of the smoke detectors in my house have been replaced with Google Nest Protects, and they make it much easier to figure out which one needs attention, but this wasn’t that.

And I wanted to go back to sleep, so I turned on some white noise on my phone using the Simply Noise app, and eventually, slowly, went back to sleep.

So, I have sleep top of mind.

By the way, it was a carbon monoxide detector whose battery, I guess, was dying.

But when I replaced the battery, it kept doing it.

This is a portable carbon monoxide detector.

It’s not expired.

I don’t know why it continued to fail.

It’s only seven years old.

It’s supposed to last for 10.

But because I have a Google Nest Protect in the same room as that carbon monoxide detector and the Nest Protect checks for both smoke and carbon monoxide, I just chucked the beeping one because I hate it now.

But so, I was thinking about sleep.

On Sunday night, I had much of the cast of Avenue Q over to watch our illegally filmed video of the production.

Not illegally filmed.

Honestly, we were allowed to film it.

We just can’t do anything with that video.

Like, it can never be online.

It can never be shown.

It’s, you know, just for our private use only.

And we got to watch the show, and I was nervous, actually, to watch it because I knew I thought my cast had done well.

My fellow cast members.

But I was like, I don’t know how I did.

I don’t know if I’m going to like what I did, but I was okay with it.

I was not, like, cringing at myself, which is great.

So that was fun to get to watch.

And then several people in the cast, you know, don’t have kids or, you know, are kind of freelance for their jobs or they work late shifts.

So they were ready to go and, like, meaning to go hard.

To go late.

And the last guests didn’t leave until around 2 o’clock in the morning.

And it’s a new school year, and currently we’re still getting up with Liam.

The older two handle themselves, but Liam, you know, his alarm goes off at 6 a.m.

He typically doesn’t respond to it for another several minutes.

He just sleeps right through it in his room, which is very cute to me.

But we’ve been getting up at 6, too, to hurry him along because he is so sleepy.

Like he can sit on his floor and basically doze while he’s supposed to be getting dressed.

Or he can sit at the kitchen table and doze while he’s supposed to be eating.

He’s not literally dozing, but he, like, he shuts down.

And so we’ve been, you know, working on keeping his bedtime pretty early, like 9 p.m.

Earlier than his, you know, than the older two did when we, when they were getting up at that time.

But he’s just, he’s struggling.

So we’ve been working on that.

But at any rate, my suggestion to Lauren had been, let’s alternate weeks.

Like you do a week of getting up early and I’ll do a week of getting up early.

That lasted less than one week because Lauren got too tired during her week.

So I would like to at least do every couple of days.

Right now we’re trying every other day, which I don’t like, but we’re giving it a shot.

So at any rate, I didn’t have to get up early on Monday.

It was Lauren’s day.

But Liam was really dragging and so Lauren was enthusiastically encouraging Liam to keep moving.

And when I say enthusiastically, I mean at a volume I could hear.

So I didn’t sleep that late.

I slept until like 6.30 after going to bed at 2.

So yesterday was a hard day.

Yesterday I got into bed by 9.30 and was asleep by probably 10 something.

I read for a little bit, 10.05 maybe.

Then I had this carbon monoxide detector beeping at 2.22 according to my iPhone and that sucked.

I did eventually go back to sleep, but since I didn’t go to find the beep or stop the beep, I could keep hearing the beep and yeah, it was bad.

And you do that thing where you like start to doze and you start like, I don’t know, for me sometimes, depending on what state I’m in when I’m falling asleep, you can start to get the crazies a little bit.

It’s basically like your very early dreams where you don’t even recognize that you’re dreaming but insanity is happening.

That’s how it is for me.

I don’t know how better to explain it, but you’re like, what is happening?

This is crazy.

Oh, I’m falling asleep and then beep and then it’s just, man, repeat that cycle for a while.

It’s going to be fine though.

Fine.

It’s fine.

Tomorrow, it’s not my day, so I can sleep a little more and hopefully Liam will.

So Liam, we were saying to him yesterday, like, look, this stinks.

You’ve got to figure out a way that you can keep moving.

And if that means we have to make your bedtime even earlier, we’re happy to do that.

Like we could go from nine to eight thirty and he like, of course, as a 12 year old boy hates this idea.

No, no, no.

Please don’t do that.

So I’m like, all right.

And he wants it to go later, which is insane.

It’s like, well, it takes me 20 minutes to fall asleep anyway.

I’m like, great.

Then let’s move you to bed even earlier so you can be asleep by nine o’clock.

He hates this idea.

So he’s he’s doing a test where if he can successfully be ready to go on time without our nudging him along five school days in a row, then we’re going to move his bedtime up later by I think I think it’s initially three minutes.

And then if he does another five days, then we’ll move it up by six minutes.

The maximum I’m willing to let go is nine thirty.

His belief is that it could go all the way to ten thirty, which is clearly not going to happen.

But yeah, we’re trying because, you know, the only thing that I do for him right now that I understand his desire to have me do is his hair.

He’s not he likes to have long hair and he’s not good at handling long hair.

So we can have him go to school looking like a mess or we can have him go to school with hair that’s been done by a parent.

But if I could get up at six forty and do his hair right before we go out to the bus, that’s better than getting him at six to just keep Liam awake while he gets ready for the day.

Anyway, here’s hoping that your alarms only go off when you’re in immediate danger.

Not so you can be in danger, but so they’re not waking up unless it’s really important.

You get it.

This is my name, Lex.