I went to see my doctor. He likes to order tests, scold me for gaining weight, and prescribe medication for a variety of woes.

I am not just at the age when I have to take pills every day; I am at the age when I can’t swallow them all at once anymore because there are too many and I will gag if I try. And not just because my esophagus is scarred and narrowed from all that heartburn I had during my pregnancies but because there truly are too many pills. As in six. And two of them are big.

If you can swallow six pills (including two big ones) at once, then you are younger than I am. This is the age when the doctor starts talking colonoscopies and a shingles vaccine.

To make me feel better (I guess?), my doctor assured me that there was no need to wait until I turned fifty (in three days), that I could go ahead and get that shingles vaccine right away.

Why are we in such a hurry, doc? “How are your kids?” my doctor asked. “About ready for college?” And then we revisited the conversation where I reminded him that I did not start my family in my twenties and that my children are only 14 and 11 and not ready for college, and then he said I needed to start putting more into their 529 plans and I was like, “I just finished worrying that I would die while they  were still breastfeeding.” And yet there we were.

Now I worry that I WON’T die. Because I haven’t exactly been contributing anything meaningful to my retirement.

An interesting thing happens when your kids are eleven and fourteen, and you are 49 (OK, 49 and 362 days). It sometimes happens that you go to bed before the kids do.

But to the great delight of nostalgia, my fourteen-year-old woke me up last night around 1am. This reminded me of all the times she woke me up at 1am during those early years.

She woke me up to let me know that there were mice outside her window eating birdseed from her bird feeder and that not only were they making a lot of noise, but the dog was barking at them and keeping her awake.  And all I could think was, “What do you want me to do?”

“Do you want to sleep in here?” I asked, like she was six again.

“No.”

“On the couch?”

“No.”

I was out of ideas. So I did what any reasonable human being would do. I woke up my husband. He went out, shooed away the mice, and brought the bird feeder inside.

And did not come back to bed.

For hours.

Didn’t bother me. I passed back out, vaguely wondering why I had not yet heard him re-alarm the house.

I suppose I learned one thing from having babies: how to fall asleep at every opportunity. Next up: extreme pill swallowing.