I do my best to get decent sleep, but like most parents, there are runs of nights when one child or another is up for one reason on another. And if you have a child with Down syndrome, with those adorable little nasal passages like my Wil’s, a simple cold quickly turns into croup which always chooses its time to attack in the wee hours of the morning.
Oh, but us parents are experts at powering on with the usual multitude of things with very little sleep. Lack of sleep or no, the demands of family, work, household chores, etc keep us moving forward without much time to pay attention to our bodies. All these demands are like adrenaline, giving our tired bodies a false sense of energy.
I’ll get to feeling pretty good about myself, that I can handle so much on so little sleep, but if I took a moment to still myself, I’d notice how very wrong I was. But our bodies are smarter than we are at getting our attention. My body sends in the wonderfully obnoxious clumsiness, that bumps itself into everything I do, telling me to get over myself and get some damn sleep already!
Autobiographical Reflections 