Today is Monday and it is sure turning into a major league suck of a day. It’s not because of anything that’s going on today, quite the opposite. Things have mostly gone well today.

Our Monday morning kid schedule now involves leaving ridiculously early so a certain honors band member can get to pre-school rehearsal. That means I have a chance to get to work super early. It also means I can get to work early enough to watch the previous night’s episode of The Walking Dead on my phone while sitting in the car. I did that a couple of times last year using my old iPhone 5. I did it for the first time using my new humongous iPhone 6 Plus this morning and damn it made a difference. I had the entire #BobBQ on the giant new screen and it was awesome sauce.

But if the actual events of this Monday aren’t the reason why this particular Monday is such a jerk, then what’s wrong?

I’ll tell you.

It’s because of last night.

My step daughter has been developing this weird hang up about sleep. She gets really freaked out if she can’t fall asleep at night. I’m not talking about insomnia, I’m talking about a 13 year old kid who has a rocket scientist of a brain and who once in a while likes to sleep late on weekend mornings. Yesterday she slept pretty late, and when bed time came around she wasn’t tired enough to fall asleep again. The result? She was so scared about not being able to go to sleep that her mind raced in a million directions (which made it worse) and eventually she started to make herself actually physically sick. It was just an upset stomach, but I have no doubt it was stress related.

We talk about this a lot these days, and my take is that her occasional inability to go to sleep right away is normal. Absolutely 100% normal. I expect that every kid in the known universe experiences the same thing at least once in a while. Hell, every grown up does too. It happens to me all the time.

I used to try and explain it to her, but she would be so upset that I might as well have been speaking Swahili. Now I have a different approach. Now I just casually say things like, “Oh well. Go read a book until you nod off.” She’ll ask what happens if she doesn’t nod off. I respond with something like, you’ll go to bed early tomorrow. Usually if I go super casual, she’ll stop worrying and think that maybe it’s not that big a deal. Last night that didn’t happen. Last night she was nauseous. Now, she did spend the weekend in the house with her mother who is dealing with something that looks like the flu, and as I’ll explain later she wasn’t the only one with an upset stomach last night.

So while I was sure her stomach distress was stress related, it was definitely there. We had nothing in the house that could help so I went to CVS. This is about 10:30 last night. An hour after her bed time, and probably half an hour after I was ready to go to sleep. I got her some Pepto and by 11:00 she had take a dose… a small dose. I was still being as casual about the whole thing as I could, and was joking about how bad Pepto tastes when the night got really weird. That was the moment my step son came into her bed room asking me to get him some warm milk because he couldn’t sleep either. This was a new one at our house. He usually drops off nice and fast. Of course, as he gets older he too is discovering the joys of sleeping late on a Sunday, and that morning he had slept later than I’d ever seen him.

I told him he didn’t need warm milk. All he needed was to just unwind. I told him to grab a book and just read it until he dropped off. That’s one great thing about both of my step kids. They are super avid readers. Give them a good book and all the world’s troubles can melt away. He wasn’t upset in the same way his sister was, he was mad. “Urgh, why did I let myself sleep late today”, he said. I put a stop to that thinking as quick as I could. There was nothing to get mad about. Sometimes, people like to sleep late, and sometimes people have trouble falling asleep at night. It’s nothing to get mad about, it happens to everyone alive. Absolutely every single one of us.

As he went back to bed, it sort of set his sister back a little. She was freaked out again. She said that she didn’t like being alone in the house. She meant that she didn’t like being the only one awake. I asked her if I, fully dressed having just come home from the store, looked like someone ready for bed? I told her that there were four of us in the house, and three of us couldn’t sleep. She wouldn’t be alone that night, literally or figuratively. I think that helped. She relaxed a little and picked up a book.

Of course this whole thing had me so would up that there was no way I was getting to sleep any time soon. I unloaded the dishwasher and then scoured the house looking for dirty dishes. I did a quick cleaning of the living room, just straightening things up a little. I made my lunch for Monday, which I just finished a minute ago, and I took a dose of Pepto for myself. Why? I think it’s weight watcher’s simply filling’s fault. You see, that program lets me eat peanuts. In the last few weeks I’ve been hitting the peanuts pretty hard. On Sunday I went a touch overboard and I think it made me a little queasy. I eventually did go back to bed, but it was a little after midnight before I dropped off, and then I was up again briefly at 1:30, and then the alarm clock went off at 5:00.

So my Monday isn’t sucking due to anything that’s gone down on Monday, it’s sucking because there was almost no sleep on Sunday. I suggest that if everyone in the industrialized world would just go home and nap for 2-3 hours, then this particular Monday would improve greatly. It would still suck, it is still a Monday after all, but it would be better.