>Today’s Open Eye Puzzles Brought to You by Punky

My husband and stepdaughters were out of town last night. (I know what you’re thinking but no, I didn’t kick them out after finding the mess they’d left for me when I returned from Atlanta a few days ago.) With a rare night to myself, I got the little ones in bed by 8:30 and stayed up until after midnight.

It was wonderful to have a few hours entirely to myself without wondering at every moment whether one of the kids would wake up and interrupt what I was doing, which wasn’t much of anything, but still! Time! To myself! The Nanny Diaries on DVD never looked so good!

Fast forward to this morning. I guess technically, it was morning, although when the sun hasn’t yet risen, I prefer to think of it as ‘night time.’ Is that so wrong? According to my children, yes.

Bruiser was up at the ungodly hour of five AM. I gave him a bottle, which generally guarantees another hour of sleep, and brought Punky to my bed so that his gurgles wouldn’t wake her. Five minutes later, I was just about to fall back asleep when…

“Mommy,” Punky whispered. “I can’t stop doing open eye puzzles.” That’s her weird code for “I can’t sleep,” and like most words of wisdom from three-year-olds, it makes perfect sense. I mean, who could possibly even think about sleeping when there are so many open eye puzzles to do?!

“Try doing some closed eye puzzles for a change,” I suggested sleepily. “I’m really tired.” Beside me on the monitor, Bruiser began squawking again. Shit.

“I just want to play,” Punky whispered.

“But it’s night time,”I whined.

“It’s play time,” she assured me. Bruiser squawked some more. This was obviously a lost cause.

“Okay, okay,” I grumbled. “Come on.” Together, we went to Bruiser’s room, where we found him standing up in his crib, raring to go. The kids saw each other and began laughing uproariously. I rubbed my eyes and looked at the clock. 5:45 AM. On a Saturday, for frick’s sake.

“Let it be known right now,” I said darkly, “that I will totally get you back for this when you’re teenagers.”

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.