The little angel, she wakes up.

She's been waking up at least once a night, usually around the witching hour, for about three weeks. I had almost made peace with having to drag myself out of a deep REM cycle, walk into her room, lay her back down, pat her red head and drag myself back to sleep. I had almost gotten to the point where I didn't really have to wake up.

Then this new thing started.  For the past two nights, she's been waking up more.

And she won't go back to sleep.

This morning, for instance, my beloved and I got up four times each.  Finally, around 5:45, I gave her a cup of milk and went back to bed.  She kept crying.  By this time, having been up every fifteen minutes since around 3:45, I got out of bed and went downstairs to do Pilates.  I haven't been feeling so hot the past day or two, and I knew I was too awake to go back to sleep.  I also knew that I would deeply regret the decision to stay up later today.

Of course, about fifteen minutes into lower-body Pilates, she stopped crying. I think the milk was probably gone by then. My beloved and little angel slumbered while I worked my way through a half hour of Pilates, sit-ups, arm crunches and then, for good measure, a half-hour of lower-body yoga.  Because when you can't sleep, you're supposed to stretch a lot.  Sure, that's it.

I went upstairs at seven to get her up.  She would not wake up.  There were huge wet stains on the sheets from the spilled milk.  Maybe giving her the milk in bed was not such a good idea.  Parents do strange things when they are half-crazed from lack of sleep.  I brought her to my beloved and dumped her in our bed, thinking that would make her wake up.  She did not stir, just rolled over and shaped her little mouth into that adorable bow that makes it impossible for me to hate her for waking me up all night, even when I really, really want to.  She is cruel.  But she stuck her bottom in the air and curled a finger around my arm, pat, patting my elbow.  Good mama - go to sleep, you silly thing. Don't you know that it's time to sleep, Mama?

I stared at her in frustration. After working all day and teaching all night, I am always exhausted on Wednesday mornings, strung out from my professional ambitions. 

We're supposed to make a roadie up to my alma mater this weekend.  I'm supposed to see all my friends I haven't seen in ten years, and a few that I normally see three or four times a year but haven't seen since February.  But I'm not taking her ANYWHERE unless she can make it through a night without this late-night partying.

I stared at the ceiling, wishing the little angel would conform to my schedule. She has never respected my schedule, and I'm sure she probably won't start anytime soon.  Still, doesn't she understand that parents secretly just want their lives to go on as normal after childbirth, just bopping along with the addition of an adorable little photo-ready human in tow?  Does she not GET IT?

No, she does not.  Despite my attempts otherwise, she is a person with her own agenda.  And she is pushing it, hard.

I have some serious stomach problems.  Yesterday after work when the little angel and I went jogging (well, I jog and she waves to squirrels from the jogging stroller), I actually had to drag her into the Burger King restroom with me while I sweated and felt my stomach heave unproductively.

After a restless sleep, I awoke also feeling ughy.  It's not really ughy enough to call in sick, considering I work from home.  I have only taken one sick day since I started working from home, and that was because the little angel was also sick.  Working from home makes it pretty hard to call in. Unless your head hurts so bad you can't see the screen, there's really no excuse.

Now I'm trying to decide if it's ughy enough to preclude me from driving a half-hour to Kansas to teach my class tonight. I get one sick day per semester.  If I use it today, I will throw off my entire syllabus, since they're supposed to get back their essays today.  They will not care if this happens.  They will throw their Sidekick cell phones in the air with glee at the idea of having all the assignments pushed back a week.  They will abuse the substitute and disappear at the break, if she is silly enough to give them one. 

On the other hand, what if I get REALLY REALLY sick later in the semester and have nothing left?  Or what if I end up with my beloved out of town for work and my mother can't come to watch the little angel and all my friends hate me and won't help out? 

I'm being ridiculous.  The problem is that the ugh factor is right on the line.  I will probably go.  I'm dumb like that.

Ugh.

And for those of you in the peanut gallery who would think it would be really funny if I were pregnant again, that's not it.  Morning sickness for me does not set in this early.  I take those pill things.  La la la la la la la la

This weekend I was in my hometown visiting my parents and sister while my beloved drank his way across Columbus.  At first, I thought I wouldn't go out with Sister Little, because how pathetic is it to go to someone else's ten-year-reunion festivities?  Especially when that person is three years younger than you are?  Pretty pathetic.

And pretty fun.

So Friday night, I allowed her to drag me first to the local bowling alley. The bar attached to the bowling alley is a major local watering hole.  First, you can buy mixed drinks for $2.  Sure, they're made with such fun liquors as Popov Vodka, but they are cheap and they get you mind-blowingly drunk in a scarily short amount of time.  We went into the beer garden, specially erected for the big Homecoming weekend (you who have not been to my hometown for homecoming will just NOT UNDERSTAND - they actually close every business in town at noon on Friday so the entire town can go to the parade and the football game). 

I ended up talking to a girl from my class who has three children. The oldest child, I learned at my own ten-year reunion, is obsessed with vacuum cleaners.  So much that he wanted a vacuum for his birthday.  I asked about this child, and she said she'd actually gotten calls from the Jimmy Kimmel show for her child to come on out and talk about his love for vacuums.  Then she told me that this child is now six.  It is still insane to me that my peers have six-year-old children.  I drank some more.

Then I wandered over to a group of girls in the class below me.  By this point, I was sort of tipsy, so I managed to forget that one of the girls I was talking to not only went to my college but was in my sorority.  Nice, eh?  She was four months pregnant and not amused by my ineptitude.  At this point, Sister Little decided it was time to move on to the requisite party in a cornfield.

We got in the car with one of my sister's breastfeeding friends (always look for the pregnant and breastfeeding when you're drunk and needing a ride) and drove seven miles out of town to a random housing development backed up to a cornfield.  We saw a huge steel building, a house, and a stage.  Yes, a stage.  There was actually a cover band out there in the middle of nowhere playing glam rock from the '80s and a little John Cougar. 

Sister Little proceeded to get hammered (it is your right at your ten-year to do so) while I chatted up a bunch of her friends. I was sobering up, since Sister Little kept stealing the bottle of wine we'd dragged out to the cornfield to drink out of plastic cups (I hate beer, and she'd already drank all hers).  The night was capped off for me by seeing a 30-year-old man walking around in a Redneck University t-shirt, complete with Dixie flag, brandishing a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon.  Ah, the memories.

The little angel's favorite babysitter (and my friend) came over last night, because we had to go to dinner with some people from my beloved's new work.  All went well, but as we were chatting after slipping her the cash, she complimented the little angel.

"She is just a beautiful baby," she said.

I blushed, eyes downward modestly.  "Oh, thanks."

"Even if she is the hugest child I have ever seen."

Pow!  Again with the weight thing.

I tried to steer the conversation to how much she'd slimmed down as she grew over the past few months.  To no avail.

"Yeah, when she was a baby, it was like she was this blob with a head," she said cheerfully, oblivious to my dismay.

Well, she was a big baby.  I'll give my friend that.  But really.  But please.  She's a small child, a toddler.  I don't want her to look like a spider monkey.  She looks fabulous.  I will not be going all Spanglish on her if she's a chubby adolescent, either.  I was there, folks, and emerged normal on the other end (well, there was a brief foray into too skinny, but that's what preteen fat comments will do to you).

I'm sure my own struggles with my weight have lent me a mother-bear quality unattractive to others regarding the little angel's weight.  She has been out on the trail with me three times a week since she was born, and I plan to bring her with me as long as I can force her to do things, letting her choose only bike vs. run vs. roller skates, not go vs. not go.  But really, I was a 100-pound fourth grader.  She got my nose and my shoulders.  She may very well get my adolescent awkwardness, too.  And I swear I will KILL anyone who makes fat jokes around her once she is old enough to realize what they are saying, which will probably be tomorrow.

Or I'll just show her the photos of Kate Moss snorting cocaine and tell her skinny ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Tonight we were sitting around eating dinner after the little angel went to bed.  "Flip over to CNN so we can see what's going on with the hurricane," I said.

My beloved flipped over, and there was a JetBlue plane, preparing to land with its landing gear rotated at a 45-degree angle.  The hub of the wheel was facing FRONT.

My heart dropped.  As my pulse raced, I thought, I cannot watch another tragedy on live television.  I just can't.

The plane was coming in for a landing.  Larry King was talking to some other pilot who flew similar planes.  There was no foam on the runway, no visible fire trucks.  Just this plane with bent landing gear and a long stretch of asphalt runway.

It descended with that whacked-out wheel. I felt like I really might have a heart attack. 

Come on, baby.

Come on, come on, come on.

I couldn't watch.

I did watch, and the back wheels touched down.  The nose stayed in the air for two or three beats.  Flashbacks of 9/11 live television flitted past my eyes.  The NPR reports of the roof ripping off the dome in New Orleans played in my ears. 

Come on, come on, come on, dammit. 

The front wheels touched down.  Live. 

I thought - oh, God...a 737 is going to explode, and I am going to watch it.

Larry told the pilot to be quiet.  We were holding our breaths.  I could feel vein in my temple throbbing.

The wheels melted and caught fire.  I thought I might throw up.

Then...it skidded to a stop.  Nothing exploded.  I could see the pilot in the cockpit jumping up and down.

On this night, maybe a night or two before another hurricane that shares my name will or won't wreak havoc on my country and my Houston-based, hunkered-down cousins, nothing bad happened.  Nobody died. 

We will watch victory footage tonight.

The firetrucks circled the plane, but the firemen didn't run.  The ambled over to the staircase wheeled to the door and shook the hands of the deplaning passengers.  There were no shots of crying relatives.  There were no voiceovers of last words.

America dodged a bullet tonight.  And that, my friends, is good television.

Sister Little's high school ten-year reunion is this coming weekend.  She convinced me to bring the little angel up to Iowa for a visit and to keep her from having a nervous breakdown at the thought of having to face her arch-nemeses again.  My beloved is going to be somewhere in Ohio, watching football and drinking much beer.  Probably Natty Light (gag).

She has been talking about it all week: what to wear, what pre-reunion primping to do, etc.  I remember my ten-year reunion.  I was sort of freaked out by it, too.  Before I went, I googled many of my old high-school friends, then myself.  It's sort of like in high-school P.E. when they make you take the Presidential Fitness Test and compare how high everyone can vertical.  The self-Google is sort of like that.  Did I get further than anyone else?  Is my self-Googling where I always imagined it would be (before I could imagine the Internet, but still)?

My sister's angst made me decide to do my own little personal vertical again. Funny, though, now I have to self-Google both my maiden name and my married name. It divides my accomplishments into little piles, further compounded by the fact that I did a lot of writing under my pen name, which is sort of a bastardized version of my maiden name.  My pen name is the only one that made anything official:  The Kansas City Public Library listings.  Yeehaw!  It's almost like I wrote a book.  My married name - it is not doing so well.  The best thing I could get was a listing on a dolphin-watching site from my honeymoon. This is humbling. I have been married for four years.  What the hell have I been doing?

Still, the public library. It almost makes up for the fact that someone else with my former name is eating up all the good spots because she's the PR contact for the MS Society.  Someone else with my pen name is apparently a rocket scientist.  Dude, I so totally could've done that instead.

Then I tried to find some old classmates, to no avail. Unfortunately, everyone from my hometown has an extremely common name or has done nothing to speak of, which I KNOW is not true because a girl from a few classes below me actually made a documentary on our Homecoming procedures (they are a bit draconian) for her film school.  We are almost famous.

I've just checked the weather.  It's going to be 85 degrees all week, again.  With some rain, which will make the air feel like a warm wet washcloth on the days when I actually try to jog.

The trees are lush with the recent rainfall.  "Turn pretty colors?" they ask.  "WHY?"

I imagine the pumpkins are sweating their asses off in their patches, getting ready for their big debut.

I'm not usually one to gripe about warm weather, but we had a day or two there of blissful 75-degree perfection.  WANT. IT. BACK.  Loved it!  The little angel played outside for over an hour.  She did not get bored in the vapid air conditioning, staring at her same old, boring toys.  She chased bunnies!  And squirrels!  She stacked rocks!  She pretended to water the grass! She dug in the dirt!  She did all of those glorious, free, no-toys-required things that little kids do when it's not so dang hot outside.

So, okay, trees.  Let's see some action.  And tell the sun to lay off for a while.   I know, global warming.  But come on!  It's time for autumn!

Yesterday we sucked it up and took the little angel to church.  I wish I could say we went more often, but the truth of the matter is that church and the little angel's lunch are sort of at the same time.  Oh, sure.  They have an 8:15 service.  But somehow, despite the fact she usually wakes up at 5:30, we can often coax her into lying still while we attempt to recapture that extra hour of sleep.  Then we are so zombie-ridden that getting all three of us clean, ironed and out the door by 7:45 is too much to do six times a week.  So, the 10:30.

We brought along six books, two kinds of snacks, a tippy cup and three small toys.  The little angel looked resplendent in a butterfly dress sent by her auntie from a boutique in Chicago.  She garnered all sorts of compliments and smiled winningly for about thirty minutes. Then, it was lunchtime. 

As I was walking her up and down the back hall, trying to make it to Communion (my internal "it's okay to give up now" point), a helper accosted me to sign up for photos for the church directory.

Now.

First the room mother thing, and now the church directory?  Am I really that old?  The little angel and I finished our walk, and I held my tongue.  As we rushed out of the church IMMEDIATELY following Communion (bless the new vicar, but she is a windy one, and with her tight red curls covering her head, it feels sort of like having the hard-knock life explained by an older Annie), I mentioned the church directory to my beloved.  He raised an eyebrow.

"Do YOU want to do it?" he asked.

"It makes me feel old," I said.

"Do we have to?"

"I don't think so.  We can use the same methods we used for the room-mother thing.  Avoidance."

"Let's skip it this year."

"Agreed."

We glanced in the back seat.  She is awfully cute, and certainly we don't mean to avoid the church community.  We give our offering and hold the little angel out to the old ladies in wheelchairs as we pass them in the Communion line.  I just don't think we're fully ready to commit to church picnics, anything involving potluck, Wednesday-night get-togethers or photos in the directory.  I don't know any good recipes (or I do, but they're not mine, since I can barely make tuna casserole once a week).  Again, I KNOW I'm an adult.  I even KNOW I'm a parent.  But do I really, really have to be a grown-up?  Really?  I still let the little angel dance to "Funky Called Medina" when it comes on the radio.  Eek.

Hello, I'm feeling a little punchy today.  I don't feel bad about any of the following:

• I am still obsessed with this Katrina issue, and yes, I think we should still be talking about it and sending those people some clean underwear. 
• The little angel loves the Emerald City so much that sometimes she doesn't want to leave, and I am happy about it.
• I leave the little angel every Tuesday night with her sports-watching father so that I can go spend four hours teaching people who don't want to learn how to write logical position essays.
• I secretly wish everyone wanted to read all the unpublished garbage loading up my computer hard drive.
• I don't really care that we lost an entire refrigerator and freezer full of food last night because I really didn't want to eat that bison anyway.
• My nails look like shit.
• I can't make my bangs look proper, and so I don't even try.
• Most days, I do not wear any make-up at all and parade around Kansas City in a t-shirt and gym shorts.
• I wish my friends would take better care of their hearts.
• I wish my co-workers would have to do my job for oh, about three hours, while listening to them on the phone with a shitty cell-phone connection and the beginnings of an ulcer.
• I call my mother damn near every day.
• I love it that she called around Kansas City looking for dry ice for my refrigerator, even though that would probably blow our entire house up.
• I think the little angel is cuter than many other children.
• I hope she does not develop an affinity for organized sports.
• Part of me hopes she will develop my husband's sanguine, everything-will-be-all-right personality and not my navel-gazing, let's-overanalyze-the-world's-problems-until-we're-all-depressed-and-shit soul.

Okay.  Enough for one day.  But I don't feel bad.  Not one bit,.