Daylight savings isn’t usually an ass-kicker for this long, but when a 2-year-old dictates the household sleep schedule the amount of suffering can be measured in weeks.

We have a twin bed in Finn’s room ready for when she graduates out of the crib, and when she caught a head cold a month back, she had problems sleeping. I propped her up on a pillow and wedged her in between me and the wall, and she was able to sleep most of the night like that. From then on, unfortunately, we got into a pattern where she’d wake from a nightmare and want to sleep in the big-girl bed (previously I would crawl into the twin and talk her back asleep from across the room) next to me. This was partially my fault, because there were several nights when I wanted to get her back asleep as quietly as possible, and also because it was very comforting to sleep next to her. The ability to soothe her back to sleep and the knowledge that she was safe and warm next to me was gratifying, and the fact that she puts off more heat than a battleship’s boiler didn’t hurt either.

We were slowly weaning off the practice up until Daylight Savings hit—I’d go in, slide under the covers on the twin, and talk her back to sleep—but now that daylight is coming earlier it’s harder to get her to go back down. If she’s in bed with me, she’ll start stirring before the sun is up, and roll around the bed sleepily knocking me with elbows and knees like a wrestler having a seizure. Soon, she’ll be sliding off the bed and pulling the covers from my shoulders, saying “I want to wake up now, Daddy,” and sometimes she pulls them off the bed completely and sometimes she rests her head on my chest, plugs her thumb in her mouth, and leans on me for a few moments until I stagger to my feet. So until her internal clock resets itself (which I predict will be sometime in late December), I’m not going to be getting a good night’s sleep.

In the meantime, I’m dragging due to (what I think is) a slight cold of some kind. Or, it could be seasonal affective disorder, or whatever it is they call “this weather/lack of sunlight-is-bumming-me-out” syndrome. I went to drawing class last night and just couldn’t make anything work besides one good charcoal drawing; everything else was out of proportion or not gelling the way I wanted it to. Overall it’s been great to go back and draw again, and I feel like I’m doing some different things with my technique which is actually making me think about painting for the first time in twenty years. Some of the other people in the class have inspired me to branch out as well, which is a welcome change.

The studio draws some very interesting people. There’s Mr. Pervert Man, an older dude with coke-bottle glasses and a perpetual scowl, who draws in a tiny sketchbook with colored pencils and has to be reminded not to touch the models every third week. He’s been there since I started attending the studio fifteen years ago. There’s Older Yoga Model, a paunchy dude who contorts himself into very interesting but very difficult poses and likes to come around and look at the drawings of himself, which isn’t creepy until he starts talking about how inspired he is to do interesting poses. There’s Full-Body-Contact Sketch Guy, who brings in a brick of charcoal and assorted abrasive materials; he spends five minutes applying large swaths of black to an unfortunate piece of paper and the rest of the evening noisily scraping it off with sandpaper. And then there’s Painter Guy, who can produce an absolutely flawless oil painting in three hours out of a kit the size of a lunchbox.

I’d like to stop and thank Mother Nature for taking the time to let me stop and enjoy the change of colors this year, as opposed to dropping her drawers after the first fall shower. The larger maples and oaks in the Ville have been in full brilliant color for two weeks now, and it makes the gradual slide into winter’s grey darkness a little easier to bear.