Because I am Two Years Old.

Sarah and I took Annie and Lucy to the ballet on Sunday afternoon. I discovered this sweet dance company in town that puts on three performances a year specifically geared to young kids and families. They're an hour long and they're all based on stories that kids know. Annie and I had gone to Twas the Night Before Christmas back in December, and this time we invited some girlfriends to see Peter and the Wolf. This is not a story I knew, but I figured: children's ballet, fairy tale, what's not to like?

So we're sitting there in our lovely fifth-row seats before the piece begins, and announcer-voice behind the curtain begins explaining how, in Peter and the Wolf, each character is represented by an instrument. There's the duck, who gets horns; and the bird, who is the flute . . . and the HUNTERS WITH RIFLES, who are drums. "Oh boy," mutters Sarah. The lights go down and all is well with the bird and Peter prancing around the meadow until the wolf comes out. I glance to my right and see Annie glaring at the wolf with her meanest look while Lucy is covering her eyes with her hands and peeking through her fingers. Sarah and I were cracking up but also secretly hoping that there was some sort of non-violent, happy ending coming our way. (There was: the hunters help Peter bring the wolf back to the zoo, while the duck miraculously survives being eaten, is magically regurgitated, and shakes hands with the wolf. Ha!)

Afterwards, I had two main thoughts. One, perhaps I should be doing a bit more research before carting my children off to performances I have never seen before; two, I was giving ten-to-one odds that Annie would be waking up in the middle of the night, crying, claiming that there was a wolf in her room.

Surprisingly, she didn't. But guess what? If she had, I probably wouldn't have heard her. That's because I've started sleeping with a sound machine next to the bed. That's right. The little $20 machine I bought last-minute at Bed Bath and Beyond to bring to Florida has found a new home in my room, and the "rain" sound has given me the most consecutive nights of good sleep in my own bed with my husband since summer 2004. And sometimes I worry that the girls might wake up and cry out for me and I might not hear them, now that I'm actually ASLEEP. And then I think, hey, it's been FIVE STRAIGHT YEARS since I could count on a good night's sleep, so I guess if something is that wrong, they can come and get me, or, in Jemma's case, yell good and loud until Jason wakes up.

While I'm admitting to being a toddler with my needs-sound-machine-to-sleep, let me just also say that I've been eating a lot of PB&J's on white bread, lately, that I'm on the hunt for some cute rainboots for spring, and that I'm starting to get excited about next winter's possible trip to Disney. The truth is out: I'm not thirty-one, I'm two, or three, or four. And I love to sleep during the rainstorm.