Sleeping in. And confessions.

If I wake up to silence, I know that Paul has somehow whisked the baby out of the room without me waking up enough to hear it and--more impressively--convinced Caleb to walk on tiptoes and whisper when he's upstairs. That silence (which is really just the quiet whir of the fan without any baby squeaks or the floorboards reverberating from big boy jumps to punctuate it) was what I woke up to today. Much squinting revealed the fact that it was, in fact, 9:34 a.m.--late enough to make me worry that everyone else was still sleeping in various parts of the house with Caleb missing preschool. But that's never happened before, and it didn't happen today.

What does happen when Paul lets me sleep in is that I'm consumed by guilt. This is partially because I'm clearly slacking while Paul is working, juggling the baby, and wrangling the five-year-old--meaning that two of the three jobs he's doing are "mine."* But mostly the guilt is borne of my childhood, when I was inculcated with the sure knowledge that waiting around to do the work just meant I'd have less time to play.

Which overwhelming guilt is why I ate three chocolate cookies with my lunch and am sitting at the computer at 1:07 p.m. with wet hair.

*Required disclaimer: Since our children are as much Paul's as they are mine--and since he was gone for four days and four nights last week--I really don't feel any guilt about him caring for his own children. I do feel guilty when I'm just lying in bed, making everyone else wait on me like I'm the Queen of Sheba. Because I'm morally opposed to maids. (This feeling is only intensified when I get the martyred feeling that I'm the maid.)