Friday, September 12, 2008

Maybe It's Time To Invest in Some Sheep

It would appear that I am somehow not in sync with my family when it comes to sleeping arrangements. Somehow, the three of them all know when we're going to have a sleepless night, whereas I trundle off to bed thinking it will be a standard slumber. Silly me.

First, my lovely wife gets a bout of insomnia. This is a shame, but not entirely unheard of. So, she flips channels while I drift off to sleep. I woke up long enough to see Letterman harassing Jack Hanna, so this was, as far as I was concerned, a win.

The Moose then chimes in with some coughing. Okay, a lot of coughing. Maybe even some hacking. It's hard to say. Either way, I sort of half sleep through that, listening for anything more serious.

Then the Princess comes into our room, and she says she can't sleep. Having been awoken a few of times now, I'm not in helpful daddy mode so much, so I tell her to get a glass of water, restart her lullaby music and return to bed. She does so, and we all move on.

So now we've made it to around 2 AM, and the Moose has a coughing fit that is sufficiently vicious to produce what sounds like coughing up a tremendous hairball. I have this really weird mechanism where I can be dead asleep, but when something is wrong, I leap out of bed and I'm in the boy's room before I really have a complete thought. It was a misfire thank goodness (no hairball), but my lovely wife (who may or may not have fallen asleep by that point) volunteers to give him his nebulizer that we may stop the coughing. He get's his meds to the light of the Cosby show, and I put him back to bed.

Having alleviated any medical issues, Mother Nature decides that an hour and a half of sleep is sufficient, and we get a rollicking thunder storm around four. This leads to the Princess returning to our room, this time visibly unsettled by the storm. She requests entry into our bed, but this typically results in a flurry of little knees and elbows being jabbed between her mother and I. Since her bed fits two better than our bed fits three, I end up grabbing my alarm and sleeping in her bed with her, sandwiched between a pink elephant and a pink poodle.

So, yeah, I don't know how they do it, but somehow everyone knew last night was no sleep night. If I had had more warning, I would have prepared. Made dip or something. Maybe cupcakes. At the very least, I wouldn't have spent yesterday reading up on Japanese urban legends, a mistake that left me more than once half asleep and prancing up the stairs too fast with the ridiculous though of what might be behind me.

Today, just in case, I'm going to keep all my research puppy and rainbow related.

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