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Hey Dad,

I don't know about you, but I'm feeling a little bushed. I got back late after a speaking engagement and head out again today for Flint, MI for another late night of speaking. It doesn't help that my kids came into my room about every 45 seconds last night.

First, it was my daughter Maggie with some kind of leg cramp. I massaged it out and sent her back to her room only for her to return a half hour later (just when I fell asleep).

"It still hurts," she said … or I think she said that.

I massaged it again and said (not so much out of pity and concern but out of annoyance), "Just get in bed with us."

I remembered her taking up a lot less room the last time she joined us, but this time I felt trapped between her and my wife, unable to roll over. After an hour of feeling like a mummy, I got up, grabbed a pillow, and flopped down on the couch in our bedroom but not before I stumbled around looking for a blanket, which I never found.

So for an hour, dressed only in my skivvies and a t-shirt, I shivered myself to sleep only to be awakened by three-year-old Cal who was prancing around like a flamenco dancer in pain, "I've got to go to the bathroom." For a brief moment I considered letting him go in his pajamas but knew that was not a good idea.

He trotted off to bed and I went back to my shivering sleep on the couch, only to find one-year-old Jed standing beside me with his head resting on my back. If I hadn't been so delirious, I would have hollered. Instead I scooped him up, along with my pillow, and thought I'd take him back to his bed and sleep with him in his nice, warm bed.

I tossed him in his bed only to find that my 10-year-old son Ike was sleeping there for who knows why and I wasn't about to climb up into his toy-filled bunk bed. So finding the only bed available, Jed and I slipped under Maggie's pink-flowered comforter for a final few minutes of slumber.

While I lay there, I admit that I thought about how nice it would be to have kids who didn't need so much attention. And then I thought about how one day not too far out in the future I would have children that didn't need so much attention … and how terrible it would be.

And with that thought I drifted off to sleep only to be awakened 30 minutes later by children chasing each other, screaming, and running laps through the house.

Life is beautiful, and I'm glad I'm a dad … but man, I'm tired.

You 'da dad … enjoy it today,

© 2009 Todd Wilson. Used by permission

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