Perils of dressing in the dark

So the other morning, I'm at work, and my cubie neighbor Hil happens to look down at her shirt. "Well look at that," she says. "I got dressed this morning and wore a pink bra under a light shirt." So I look, and I can barely see it, but I totally understand where she's coming from. Hil is a mom to twin two year old boys, and when we get up for work, we do it really early. Some people in my department come to work at 3:30 am. This is what life is like in fraud prevention. Much of our success rate depends on finding counterfeit/forged/stolen/notrealmoney/etc before our branches open, and the people come in and withdraw the funds. So we work really early for the most part. So when we get dressed in the morning, it sometimes involves trying not to wake up sleeping children or other household members. Sometimes we get dressed in the dark.

Not ten minutes later, I get up to go to the fax machine. While I'm there I look down at my shirt. Usually there's some sort of breakfast cereal on there (another result of working very early mornings. We go on breakfast break. Or eat it at our desks while getting the news fix, in my case.). Today, I happen to notice something else. I'm wearing a black bra. Under a white shirt. Fortunately it's a high quality Eddie Bauer turtleneck with a high percentage of spandex, so hopefully it's not so noticable that my coworkers think I'm trying to make a statement. I remember how I had planned to wear a black shirt, but had to change pants and in so doing changed my shirt to match the new pants. In the dark, because Jupiter was asleep in my bed.

Once, a few months after Jupiter came home, I got my work bag in the car, Jupiter's backpack in the car, Jupiter coated and hatted and in the car, and drove off up the street. About six houses away, I noticed I was still wearing my house slippers. I debated going home to change into other shoes, but since it wasn't raining or snowing, I opted just to go to work in the slippers, figuring it would be worth a laugh for my co-workers. Besides, they were very comfortable slippers.

Sometimes, I get really tired. You may have gathered that from the dressing mishaps. I think that all Moms are tired. It's part of being a Mom. They (the kids, not the Mom's so much.) wake up at 2 or 3 am, and go wandering around the house looking for the cat or looking out the window to see if it was snowing, because the weatherman said there was a 2 percent chance of a snow flurry on the news, or just call because they had a nightmare, and we get up and go and find them or try to comfort them, sometimes fall asleep in their bed or bring them into our beds. Or they get sick and can't sleep, and you do something really cool like give them a popsicle in bed in the middle of the night, and then you read the complete Anthology of Thomas the Tank Engine for a half hour. Today when I came home I had to take a nap for a half hour before I could pick up Jupiter and take her trick or treating. Mostly I even slept through the guy accross the river who is gearing up for the first day of hunting season by repeatedly shooting off something that sounds like a cannon. Sometimes when I'm having a conversation with somebody I forget in the middle of the conversation what we're talking about. I don't mean to be rude..it's probably just a mini nap.

Hil told me once that her husband doesn't understand how she can fall asleep one minute after she lays down. I never used to be able to do that. Now I can. It's totally a Mom thing.