nighttime confessions

i have mommy guilt about a few things, so i thought, what better way to get them off my chest than to spell them out on my blog for all the world to see? here are a few ... 1) susanna is finally catching on that i often skip pages when reading super-long books at bedtime. liam's been on to me for years -- can't slip anything past an early reader -- but i'd been successfully turning ten-minute books into five-minute books with susanna for three years now. (those disney princess books, where they tell the ENTIRE plot of the movie in excruciating detail, are painful.) when she catches me, i just pretend like i didn't realize i turned multiple pages at the same time, and then try it again later in the story. 2) sometimes, if one of the kids is calling for us in the middle of the night, i pretend like i haven't woken up so chris has to deal with it. and then i feign ignorance in the morning ... "oh, wow. didn't hear a thing! i don't know how i slept through that." 3) on nights when we're really running late -- like when we've been out at a party with the kids and get home an hour past their bedtime -- we do the quickest run-through of prayers you've ever seen. we still say the Lord's prayer in its entirety, but i've been known to severely cap the God Blesses. as in, "all righty, kids. each of you can God Bless only three people tonight. so choose wisely." i often don't make the list. i wonder why.