Bleary-eyed Mom of Two Rambunctious Night Owls Attempts Starting Day Without Coffee

You know there's something so horrific about discovering that you're out of coffee. This morning as I desperately rummaged through my freezer, eyes half closed in a foggy dreamlike state, I was hit with that very crisis. If it were a movie scene, I'm sure the music from the shower scene in Psycho would've been playing in the background. Yes, it was that terrible and shocking. I found three boxes of uneaten corndogs, five petrified popsicles from a company that's long been out of business, a couple of waffles from long ago, a half gallon of birthday cake flavored ice cream and about four pounds of ground beef. But no coffee, not even a handful of grounds spilled on the freezer floor that I could try to work with. Nothing, nada, the caffeine cupboard was bare.

Now, if this were any regular old morning, I could probably cope. I'd make a cup of tea, perhaps pop open a Diet Pepsi and try to make do. But today was different. Why, you ask. Because, I got approximately two hours and nine minutes of sleep last night. That's why. I wound up sharing an inadequate queen sized bed with two of the most active sleepers in the known world. My sons, ages seven and three who are scaredy cats about thunder and lightning and I'm a wimp at saying "no, you can't sleep with me now get back up to your rooms."

So, after I turned in at 11:30 the night progressed with Andrew sleeping soundly on the left, grinding his teeth rhythmically, kicking covers off at five minute intervals and taking up a good one-third of the bed's surface area. Jack was in the middle, arms and legs stretched out far as if he was trying to make a "bed angel" taking up the other two-thirds. Every now and then, he would encoach upon my corner and attempt to use my head as a pillow, crashing his skull into my forehead just as I was nodding off. He mumbled something about granola bars once and flung his arm across my mouth. I was doing okay sleeping in 15 minute intervals until 3AM. It ws then that Jack decided to try sleeping horizontally with his feet in my face. I think I was able to make this position work for me as long as at least one of my breathing passages remained unblocked. I probably got an hour of sleep that way.

At about 4AM, our cat Anakin jumped onto the bed and nuzzled up to me with a constant purring in my ear that could've easily been mistaken for an idling motorcycle. He also began nudging me impatiently to pet him. I threw him off the bed. He landed with a thud and jumped right back up there. I threw him down again. Again, he returned. And so it went with the boomerang feline for a good ten minutes.

At about 5AM, some random neighborhood dog began barking incessantly for an hour.

At 6AM, my alarm went off and I made the grizzly discovery in my freezer.

Now, it's 10:30 AM. I'm too awake to sleep and too asleep to function. Forget functioning. I'm going to Starbucks while there's still one in Dublin. Give me an extra venti quintuple shot latte with extra whipped cream.