I lack instinct. Gut feeling. You know, that feeling that something just isn’t right. 90% of the time I’m either wrong or completely miss it.

Case in point, a night a few years ago. It was the first night we were going into the super annoying, can’t understand why we are tortured this way, time change. These two times of the year seem to be a new way of torturing families, especially with small children, who can’t understand why bedtime is now an hour earlier.

On this first spring ahead Sunday, we were gutsy enough to try to put our children to bed early. Like, earlier than their going to bed an hour earlier bedtime. While in the long run it paid off, I did wonder what new circle of hell I had entered into, when at 8:30 (mind you, 24 hours earlier, this was 7:30), our oldest (who was apparently super freezing) was curled up in our bed with dear husband, who was snoring louder then a den of bears deep into winter hibernation, and our youngest was jumping up and down in her crib. Eventually our youngest quit jumping; our oldest was transported back to his bed and dear husband rolled on to his stomach. It felt like I had finally just gotten into an uneasy sleep when our youngest started crying out. When this happens, we’ll generally give her space to settle herself back to sleep, and she generally does.

This is where my instinct failed me. All the skills of the last four years of mothering weren’t sufficient. See, I heard her cry/whimper, rolled over and dozed while I waited for her to go back to sleep. Dear husband woke up hearing her, listened for a bit, had the instinct that something was wrong, checked on her and found her covered in vomit.

As I cleaned up her bed and held our poor, sick, crying little girl while she received an impromptu middle of the night bath, I just felt horrible. Like, instinct is one of the motherhood subjects that I’m failing, I’ve never been good at, and I don’t think any amount of tutoring will ever improve this grade.  Ahh, the dreaded mom guilt.

While I mentally packed my bags for the guilt trip I was going to go on, I tried to reassure myself that at least dear husband has “the instinct,” and in this case it was sufficient. But I sure don’t like having a failing grade in instinct (especially when we don’t even want to talk about what grade I’d be getting in housework).

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