
The other day, my five-year-old was furious at me for something.
“I’m going to send you to your room!” he yelled. “You’re going to have to stay there, all by yourself, for four hours, and you can’t come out!”
If only he had followed through with the punishment.
I am tired. So freaking tired. I can’t remember the last time I got eight hours’ sleep. Certainly not eight hours in a row.
I once read somewhere that for every hour short of eight hours’ sleep you get, you lose a point off your IQ. Apparently it accumulates, night after night. I’m surprised I can even spell IQ anymore.
Do you know what it feels like to wake up in the morning, refreshed and relaxed, ready to bounce out of bed and face whatever the day holds? My kids do. Ask them. Me, no idea.
I don’t even have a newborn as an excuse. So why am I so tired?
Kids can disrupt your sleep, well beyond babyhood. They may be capable of sleeping through the night, but that doesn’t mean they will. My kids may get up at 2am to tell me something vitally important about their nose being full of snot or the sky being dark. They may get up at 3am so they can stagger around and find a pile of toys to vomit on. They will definitely get up at 5.30am so they can come into my bed and spend an hour or two “snuggling” with me, stretching out so that I’m clinging to the edge of the bed, with no hope of falling back to sleep.

Kids are physically exhausting. They race around dangerously close to roads, beg you to play tag with them and climb on top of playhouses they can't climb down from. They need to be chauffeured to birthday parties and playgrounds and gymnastics classes. My daughter finds that travelling in a warm car makes her irresistibly sleepy. Me too. I glance at her peacefully snoozing in my rear-view mirror and sigh with envy.
Kids are mentally exhausting. My son interrogates me with an endless stream of questions. "How far is to the moon?" "Which of your friends do you like the least?" "What are sexual references?" Um...