The first thing T. likes to do when she gets up is to sit at the kitchen table and draw. While I’m fumbling around for my coffee, cutting up fruit for breakfast, watching the clock every five minutes, and shouting upstairs to L. to get a move on, T. is waking up in her own quiet way, pencil in hand.

T. has a cold. It's not one of those stay-home-from-school colds (thank goodness), but one of those I-feel-cruddy-at-night colds. Most nights, on average, T. sleeps in her own bed until about 6:00 am or so. On weekends she'll wake and come rushing into our room, where she'll climb into bed between us, snuggle down, throw her arm across my neck, and we all go back to sleep--until 8:30 or even 9:00 in the morning. As T.'s grown older, she's been spending more and more time in her own bed, just as I expected she would.

My personal dog days of the summer always start at the end of July, right around when L. goes back to school. A large part of this is because it's hard for me to see him go back; hard for me to let him go--especially during these early months of a new school year--when I can't protect him during the day, or advocate for him, or be there to make sure it's all okay. I have to sit back and hope it will all come out okay at the end.

I took T. with me to a dental appointment on Monday. She asked to go, actually. She has a loose front tooth and she was dying to show it to C., our wonderful dental hygienist who has known T. since she was a baby. C. was very impressed with the front tooth, and pronounced it ready to come out any moment. To T.'s disappointment, though, it's still there.

"I thought just GOING there would make it come out," she said, as we pulled out of the parking lot.

Shhhh...we're moving through a good patch now, with L. Things are not perfect, but some school-related things and sleep-related things that were very, very difficult have improved, lifted a little, letting the sun shine through.

Maybe it's not a cloudless day every day, but we'll settle for partly cloudy; for that gap in the clouds that surprises us now and again, with a patch of clear blue sky.

Of course, now that I've said that, I have surely jinxed it all.

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Yesterday morning I sat down to update my status on Facebook and I erased what I wrote, because all I could think to say was: I'm tired. I feel like everywhere I go lately I'm sounding like a broken record. My conversations with family and friends are the same ("how AM I? I'm tired, that's how I am") every day it seems, and I can't even twitter anymore because I'm too tired to come up with creative ways to say--in 140 characters or less--how overwhelmed I feel lately.

Sleep deprivation is the pits, it really is.

The other day I was in our local Barnes & Noble buying Scott a CD for his birthday. The friendly cashier lady, whom I like a lot, and who I swear was pregnant with her first child only like the day before, told me tiredly that she had a five-month-old at home, and she was feeling utterly exhausted.

"She's not sleeping well," she told me. "I can't wait until she grows out of this phase."

I'm someone who normally has no problem sleeping. As soon as my head hits the pillow, I'm out like a light and don't wake up until my alarm blares the next morning. However, as I lay awake last night unable to drift off, I began to wonder why I've been having trouble sleeping lately. Funny enough, I had read an article in a magazine that same day that said more and more young adults are having the very same problem.

You know how growth spurts in kids are always marked by physical and psychological changes? Sleeping through the night--or its converse, night waking? Increased appetite, or worries, or tantrums? You wonder whether something's happened to your child lately--what's set them off--and then they suddenly catch you by surprise. They seem taller, or more rounded, or their face has lost the curved cheeks of toddlerhood.

I haven't written anything about this, for fear of jinxing things, but for weeks now T. has been going to sleep by herself in her bed! She is still waking up every few nights to come running into bed with us, but I am no longer lying down with her until she sleeps, disengaging myself from the choke hold she has on my neck--even in sleep--and tiptoeing out of her room. I have those mixed feelings about this, although I thought I would feel more teary and nostalgic about this new milestone.