Waking Up is Hard to Do

Almost more difficult than falling asleep, waking up poses its own challenges. Elliot can sometimes spend ten minutes transitioning from a deep sleep to waking life. These transition minutes can be quite difficult for the little guy as he stretches all his muscles and bends his body in every way imaginable. I'm not convinced that there is too much of a cognitive distinction between these two states - waking and sleeping - but it would seem that there is a rather extreme physical disjunction that he contends with as he drifts back and forth between them each day. Speaking as an onlooker, I enjoy this process quite a bit. When he's in what I'll call a "slaking" state, he's very fun to be around. When I talk to him he seems to respond with extreme expressions. This supplies oodles of amusement for his motion picture starved parents. So imagine that I'm talking to him and I say, "Elliot, the Democrats might take the White House in 2008"


And then I say, "But Bush will be in office for another three years."


And then, just as urgently as he struggled to fight his way out of his slaking state, he falls back into a deep sleep. And Izzy, always an accomodating sibling, joins him.