And then there are the nights when you wake up to your husband poking your foot with his foot and he’s whispering across your sprawled and sleeping son that it’s six in the morning and you panic slightly because you fell asleep at 8:30 putting your son to bed despite your efforts to stay awake. (It’s actually not quite midnight. He has a storied history of announcing the wrong time in his sleep).

Not that falling asleep putting your son to bed is all that rare, but it’s more disorienting than usual when you’re in your sister’s guest bedroom because, for the second night in a row, you can’t sleep at your house because many of your belongings are stacked up in your kitchen because a company was supposed to come install new floors in your family room and dining room and upstairs hallway and downstairs bathroom on Tuesday but failed to do so because allegedly the truck carrying your flooring materials and its driver went rogue and disappeared into thin air. Fortunately the carpet installer from the same company did manage to show up, although he came alone despite the vast quantity of massive furniture to be moved out of the way in your three bedrooms. Somehow he did it by himself and he worked his tush off for nine hours to get it all done and is beautiful so you gave him a big tip. Do you even tip carpet installers?

So even though the bedrooms are carpeted you can’t sleep at home because the upstairs bathrooms are filled with objects that were in the bedrooms or in the hall and the hall floor still needs to be replaced and they’re going to have to shove those bookshelves and cubbies and your daughter’s camp trunk that hangs out there into the bedrooms so you can’t really reassemble the bedrooms yet. And your lovely new closet is overflowing with books and assorted items that were sitting onto it husbsnd’s nightstand or collecting dust under the bed and you cannot reach the clothes hanging toward the back which you need to wear for work without knocking over some of the carefully assembled piles. And when you are trying to pack overnight bags for your kids you have to hunt room by room for the trash bag of their hats and gloves because it’s supposed to snow tomorrow and when you were packing up for the floor installation it was 70 degrees so you didn’t think ahead to keep tabs on the winter accessories.

All this floor business is because of the water damage that happened now three months ago but it’s taken you a long time to solve this particular part of the problem because you knew it would be a huge hassle and low and behold it’s been a humungous hassle (approximately 10 times more aggravating than a huge hassle) but still, you know, first world problems.

Much like the first world problem of losing your iPhone in a thunderstorm and searching for it and your husband searching for it and your daughter’s martial arts teacher searching for it and becoming convinced it washed away into the sewer and going to buy a new one two days later (in a process that takes nearly two hours in part because of a belligerent and intoxicated customer who is trying his best to attract the attention of all the store employees and apparently had come in daily to do so until they threatened to call the police and he exited quickly saying, “I’m a Black man! I don’t want the police!). And then someone finds your phone and it is returned to you and seems to be working fine and you gave to figure out how to get some money back for it since you’re now paying for two phones. Again, the very nature of a first world problem.

Now it is dark and quiet and your sister and brother-in-law and nephew and husband and so and daughter are all sound asleep but you are not since you fell asleep at 8:30 and there are just a few things on your mind.