The following essay was written by Jen of Not Calm Dot Com:

Sunday night I got between the girls in their bed to cuddle with them until they fell asleep. It’s our normal routine, although Saturday night Willow was so sleepy she just crashed on the foot of the bed sometime during the nighttime rush of tooth brushing and pajama putting-oning. The window in their room is open until it gets cold again in November, so we could hear the rain falling and the car tires spraying water as they went down our street. It took the girls awhile to get settled, but they were pretty quiet and that gave me a minute to go over the to-do list in my head and realize that I didn’t get nearly enough taken care of today.

And that was when I came to an awful, horrible realization that might change my life in a way I can only think of as really, really bad. I’ll steal from Lemony Snicket here and say that right now, you should just stop reading.

I need to give you some backstory, and I will try to be brief even though my talent lies in making a short story long and not the other way around. It’s all mushed up, so I’ll just go in chronological order.

Okay. Sometime last year, Derek linked to this study about spiders and drugs. He pointed out that the spiders spinning the most useless webs were not the spiders sniffing glue, snorting coke, or shooting up into their tiny little spider appendages. It was the spiders on caffeine that did the worst. Spectacularly worse, in fact. I chose to fool myself into thinking that this was yet another urban legend, because although Derek would not be fooled, he is not above fooling others. And I continued to drink my coffee, ferociously.

Alright. Sometime this year, like two Fridays ago, I decided to do this “eating plan� thing that begins with three weeks of a detox diet. The forbidden items for the first three weeks include, but aren’t limited to: sugar, dairy, gluten, eggs, peanuts, alcohol and caffeine.* I am so proud to say that I stopped drinking coffee. It was H A R D for me to do, but I did it. About 48 hours or so after my last cup, I even took a nap, in the middle of the day. Luckily, I wasn’t driving at that particular time, because that nap would not be denied.

So. This past Friday night Willow fell asleep on her bed at something like 5 p.m. It was certainly before supper, because I remember saving her something to eat. But she slept so long that I just decided to let her be, which ended badly for me at 2 a.m. on Saturday when she woke up all refreshed and asked to go to the park. I was able to get her to doze off and on by nursing her until 5 a.m. And that was profoundly stupid, because she slept, but I did not. I was busy thinking “Yeow! This ain’t fun and it hurts!� At 5 I admitted defeat and we got up and played blocks and had breakfast. Still, Saturday I cranked out a ton of work, mostly in the boys bedroom which I transformed. (By the way, how would you punish a child who left a grape popcicle to melt on the top bunk? I was too busy trying to imagine that scenario to do more than say, “DUDE! What made you think THAT would lead to anything good??�)

Saturday afternoon I was very sleepy, and so I had a half cup of coffee (with unsweetened, gluten-free soy milk). It totally worked its magic and got me through the day. Well, Sunday came and we all know that Sunday morning is made for coffee consumption. Made. For. It. Especially this Sunday morning, which was grey and windy and rainy. So, I cheated and I toxed myself with first one, then two, half-cups of coffee in that really big mug my mom brought me from Paris. That adds up to two cups, easy. Probably more.

You totally know what I figured out tonight, as I reflected on the fact that I didn’t get things done as planned today. As I berated myself for being so scattered that I had to go to the shoe store twice because I got Sophie the wrong size sandals, when I know her size. As I realized that I forgot to make some phone calls and didn’t get that thing ready to go in the mail.

Coffee is not my friend. Coffee keeps me far from any form of efficiency. It has to be goodbye forever, and not just for three weeks. If it wouldn’t have woken everyone up, thereby creating much more work for me, I’d have thrown a screaming, foot stomping fit that would have put both my girls to shame and scared my boys half to death.

Decaf recommendations graciously accepted. Thank you.

*I know it sounds like something the skeevy Opus Dei guy from the Da Vinci code would do to himself when he was feeling in need of real punishment, but actually, the food is excellent and I’m never hungry. If you want the title of the book, email me. I might wear out my welcome if I’m hawking some guy’s book on the MommyBloggers blog, you know? And I apologize for the book/movie reference; I am so sick of hearing about it that I thought it would be funny to add to the very thing that annoys me!