Or maybe remind me to keep even my mind shut, because I didn’t even say it out loud. Last night, for whatever reason, I was thinking about how Breanna didn’t pull the Midnight Madness as often as Hayley did.

Midnight Madness was what we called it when she would wake up right around the time we were thinking about going to sleep, and she would stay up for hours. It was also how we referred to middle of the night wake-up sessions, where she would suddenly perk up at, say, 3 am and decide there was nothing she wanted to do more than say wide awake for at least three hours.

Breanna has done it on occasion, but not anywhere near as frequently as Hayley. Hayley always treated sleep as something that was possibly the worst waste of time she could possibly imagine and she would do everything in her power to avoid it. Breanna enjoys sleep, she even asks to go “night-night” when she’s tired. Putting her down for a nap is usually very easy and fast – she has a predictable routine where she’ll suddenly start making unreasonable demands, she’ll get extremely pissed off when we don’t do what she wants, then she’ll throw herself in my arms and if I ask if she wants to go to sleep she wails, “night-night!” Then she falls asleep within ten minutes tops. It’s nice. Bedtime usually takes a bit longer but isn’t bad either.

So there I was last night, thinking, “I’m so happy that Breanna doesn’t do the Midnight Madness like Hayley did.” Then I realized that I was completely dragged-down exhausted, so I just about crawled around, getting myself ready for bed, when I heard the door open down the hall and little feet pattering along the floor. Looking confused and ticked off about being upright, Breanna barrelled into the living room and I carried her back to bed. I willed myself to not fall asleep since I still have to pee and waking up for a bathroom break a few hours later was not in my plans. I managed to hand in there until she was asleep, and ten minutes later my weary body crashed onto the mattress so I could sleep too.

And naturally, at 3:21 am, she woke up. I don’t know what time she went back to sleep because I stopped looking at the clock eventually, but I know it was after 4:30. Eventually, I told her to go ahead and stay up all night if she wanted but to be quiet and leave me alone since I wanted to go to sleep now. I figured, in my mind, that at least she was likely to sleep in a bit.

Which is why she woke me up at 7:15 am and raring to face the day.

Some days, there’s just not enough caffeine.