She demanded milk.

My dear darling daughter woke up this morning at 4:45ish.  (It may have been 4:43, or 4:47, but for purposes of my retelling, I'll go with 4:45. ish.) She was demanding milk.  When I say demand, I mean crying and wailing and screeching.  The sort that means my sleep is contingent on her demands being met.  It's not something malicious, it's apparently just what toddlers do on occasion.  *head in hands*

Sounds simple enough, right?  Nope.  There's no milk in the house.  I want to sleep. How do I go back to sleep if I have no milk? How?!

I went into the kitchen.  I peered into the refrigerator past yesterday's leftovers and around the ketchup where I had hoped to find a full gallon of milk -- or even a teeny tiny bit of milk. A drop of milk?

There was no milk.  I knew that there wasn't milk. You already knew that there wasn't any milk.  

And then I looked again.  Yes, again. This time my eye caught a container that looked like this:

Don't judge me.  Half-and-half is great in coffee.  It's smooth, it's dairy, it's white.  And I'm a mother.  Mothers improvise. I am good at improvising, usually. (Once, though, when I turned my son's much loved puppy into a crispy mess in an old dryer,  he didn't like that we were going to replace his Mr. Puppy with a new one.  We had an elaborate story about how Mr. Puppy went to the spa and came back, um, different.  He didn't buy it one bit.  He chose the crispy.fuzzy puppy over the impostor.  We gained a new family member that day, his name is Cousin Puppy, cousin of crispy.fuzzy Mr. Puppy.)

This morning, I needed to be good at improvising because I needed to sleep. Sleep deprivation causes strange things to happen.


I poured some half-and-half into a sippy cup and filled the rest with water. Seriously, how could I make her drink it undiluted?  That's just...wrong. gross. ew. *hangs head in shame while giggling*

I stumbled back into the room and handed the cup to my girl child.  She took it. She drank it. She fell back to sleep. *sigh of relief* I fell back into my bed and I giggled while telling my husband what I just did.  He mumbled something to me, but I don't think he was surprised, and he rolled over ;)

Woo!  Parenting Win?  Parenting Fail?  Who cares?!  A little bit of desperate creative thinking, and the girl child and I both slept for a few more hours.

At least I didn't use heavy whipping cream.  I could have, you know.


Blessings! and Joy!
nIcole mArie