Despite her best intentions, local mum Lauren Winters has again woken fatigued and full of regret over the previous evening’s poor choices.
Spoiler alert: There were no Jägerbombs nor late-night kebabs in sight.
It was at the end of another long day of picking sultanas off the floor and changing gag-inducing nappies, that local mum Lauren Winters set her sight on a reasonable bedtime.
She’d spent the preceding few nights bingeing New Girl on Netflix as if her life depended on the relationship status of Nick and Jess. So at 7:30pm Lauren made the bold declaration, to noone in particular, that she’d go to bed by 9:30.
“I believed it when I said it,” Lauren told The MOTS Mail, “two hours of time to myself seemed like enough time to bring my blood-pressure back down to the levels of a woman who didn’t spend all day begging kids to find their shoes and get in the flipping car!”
With an arm almost numb from bouncing baby Charlie to sleep and after five requests for food (from kids who didn’t finish their dinner) and three speed-reads of Thelma the Unicorn, Lauren was finally where she’d wanted to be all day- smack bang in the middle of the three-seater.
“There’d been no poo-splosions or meltdowns about bath time and I avoided the trap of falling asleep early beside any of my kids,” Lauren said “so I felt like I had a good shot at getting to bed early.”
Having completed all seven seasons of New Girl in record time, she was no longer in the clutches of a TV series and had thought this too would give her an ‘early-night advantage.’
Things began to unravel when (no doubt due to fatigue from the previous night and day), Lauren experienced a complete inability to select a new show with which she could erase her mind of the day’s stresses.
“The amount of choice these days is more crippling than baking cakes for school-kids with allergies.” Lauren said.
It was almost 8:30 before Lauren, furious with herself for having wasted 45-minutes of me-time, settled on re-watching Friends.
“Better make bedtime 10pm.” She decided.
Not gripped by her Netflix selection, however, Lauren made the fatal mistake of thinking her even smaller screen would offer better entertainment and picked up her phone.
She proceeded to doom-scroll well beyond her friends’ activity on Instagram and into the platform’s “Suggested Posts”- getting lost in an onslaught of memes and Tik Tok moves she would never try. Her chances of getting eight hours sleep faded with every slide of the finger.
“Suddenly, I was reading the arguments of strangers, watching Youtube tutorials on hair-braiding and buying leopard-print activewear.”
Before Lauren knew it, it was almost midnight. Knowing it would now undoubtedly be only a few hours before at least one child wrenched her from her slumber she slumped defeatedly to bed.
“It was an unfulfilling, albeit familiar, result,” Lauren admitted, “but I’ll definitely be in bed by 9:30 tomorrow night!”
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