My children react to fatigue in very different ways. One sits on the edge of delirium, spastically happy until the smile is broken by some challenge to his world view. At that point He descends into a stubborn rage much like a bull supposedly does at the site of red. My youngest starts in rage mode, yelling and screaming and mad at the world. He too winds up in a bucket of his own tears once someone meets his rage with disappointment or rage of their own. The middle one cries from the onset, a rage filled wail of despair and injustice punctuated by claims that he is in fact, ‘not tired!’
The beauty of this is that they see none of it. To them, their behaviors have not changed. Instead the world has crashed down on them bringing with it several steamy flavors of injustice. This inability to reconcile with reality can be funny to watch or it can make you want to kick a kid, depending on your own mood. I admit to having felt both moods–sometimes minutes apart like emotional contractions seizing my brain and then body.
The key, of course, is to avoid situations in which they exert themselves past their limits or to institute a napping policy, though the latter course of action is likely to result in a self-styled mexican standoff wherein I represent two of the three ‘oponents’ offering the choice to sleep or to push them towards working extremely hard to the point where they are going to fall asleep on their own.
Today we had a Beyblade tournament. The excitement shook the walls. The excitement wore off near seven PM and was replaced by the wall of despair and rage. Having not fed them yet, it was impossible to put them to bed. Instead I was forced to endure the headache (actual–not figurative) of 3 ‘pissed up’ and tired little boys with no sense of their own behaviors.
10 minutes wasn’t enough to calm down.