As long as I'm up too late anyway

When I was first nursing Liza I was really heartless and did so in bed, regardless of the time of night, and generally Jason was unable to sleep through the ordeal. He's genetically unable to just lay in bed and NOT sleep, so he'd turn on the light and read while I stared at the top of the kid's head and held everything in place with both hands, a Boppy, and occasionally half a roll of duct tape. Liza wasn't exactly a poster child easy nurser, and only months later did I finally get to the point where I could actually hold a book with one or two fingers. For the first few months it was 45 minutes of doing absolutely nothing, six or seven or eight times a day. I thought I was going to go insane. Oh, wait - I kinda did.

Anyway, at some point I started doing crosswords and Sudoku puzzles when I was pinned down on the couch by a sleeping kid who would wake up screaming if I made any attempt to move her into a crib, and it began to annoy me that I couldn't continue to work on them at 2am while nursing. Eventually I managed to convince Jason to read the crossword clues out loud while he sat beside me in bed, giving me a chance to answer before he wrote anything in.

My ability to do the not-terribly-difficult crosswords without seeing the grid almost made up for Jason's lightning speed on Sudoku puzzles, which to me are only one step better than those annoying logic problems I hated in math class. The fact that I was doing them at all was a sign of my desperation at the time.

I'd do pretty good on the easy and moderate ones, but anything more than about two stars had me hitting a wall pretty early on, with three possibilities for each of several boxes and no visible way to omit any of them. It used to really piss me off that I'd be sitting there at the table, sleeping kid in one hand, sandwich and pencil in the other, slaving away at the puzzle, and Jason would have solved the bugger upside down from across the table. Showoff.

But I've gotten him back now. He's been buying the Sunday paper solely for the crossword puzzles, and while the local puzzle usually isn't much of a challenge, the NY Times puzzle is a beast, full of all the crap we both hate about crosswords. Usually he gets first crack at the puzzle, then he leaves it laying around on the dining room table and we alternately curse it and chip away at it throughout the rest of the week.

But I just finished Sunday's Times puzzle, the one he only had about 1/4 full when he went to bed last night, and which he added a few answers to this morning. And I only had to peek at like two answers to do it. Shazam!