Ask my husband if he is a sleepwalker. Better yet, ask if he is a REGULAR sleepwalker. I bet you a million dollars he claims not to be, but it's 3:50 in the morning and I am writing this BECAUSE he is a sleepwalker and right now, I would give the world to be doing anything in my sleep.
Before we had kids, it wasn't bad. It was funny even. I remember the first time he woke me up to chastise me for scaring the ducks away. I was embarrassed at first, thinking that perhaps I had been snoring and that early into the relationship, snoring ranked right up there with admitting you pooped. It didn't take too long for me to realize, however, he really thought I had scared the ducks away. I had no idea how to respond other than to apologize for scaring the ducks away (thought I cant imagine why we wanted them in our bedroom in the first place.) and I went back to sleep. We later determined that he was just so excited for duck hunting the next day that this was all he thought about and it obviously carried over into the sleeping hours. We had a good chuckle about it and moved on.
Then there were the times he got really involved in a video game. Let me just say this. Thank God he didn't play something like Call of Duty. When he played his games, I would find him rifling through the closet looking for something he needed on a quest. Had he played something violent, I'm sure I would have found him army crawling under imaginary barbed wire to escape the hand grenade that had just been lobbed into our room.
I finally got to the point where I realized each time when his conversations weren't really looking for an answer from me. The question, "What did you do with my left sock?" at 2 am was generally a sleep question that I could ignore. But then we had kids and as any of you moms out there know, with kids comes our innate ability to wake up the second our child sniffs or blinks too loudly. Unfortunately, that amazing skill set doesn't limit itself to just the kids. We hear everything. The ice maker down the hall, the clicking of the chain on the ceiling fan, the house fan turning on or off, the water heater refilling... I could go on and on, What I'm getting at is that as a mom, sleep is a very precious commodity. I'm not going to get on a soapbox about how awesome I am because I can manage 3 kids and a full time job, but seriously. I got a Jawbone a few weeks ago and this thing tells me I am surviving off of less than 5 hours of sleep per night and that is NOT solid hours. I'm actually impressed with myself that I haven't driven off into a ditch on my way to work or started snoring at my desk yet. We will see if I can continue that streak today as I am doing this on 1.5 hours right now. Of course, the Jawbone, which is supposed to motivate you to move more, apparently realized who it was strapped to and has set goals for me like "get 6 hours of sleep" or "go to bed before 10" or "sleep in on the weekend to get caught up!" Then I fail the goal and it criticizes me for not trying hard enough. I have written a letter to Jawbone asking them to please take children into consideration, but I have yet to hear back from them... I digress. My point is, I don't get enough sleep, so when my husband wakes me up to ask me if I heard that "noise" (which I didn't and let me reiterate, my super sonar mom hearing picks up everything!) I know he's sleep walking.
I KNOW he's sleep walking, but just a few months ago we moved out to BFE. Timbuktu. No Man's Land. The edge of the world. AKA: The country. I have never been a country girl and despite my husband's strong opinion that I would change, it hasn't happened yet. I hate the dark. I hate the silence. It makes all those little noises I listen for THAT much louder. So when all of a sudden my husband is convinced he heard something, and he gets up to check things out, it puts me into hyper awareness. Let me tell you, this sucks at 11:30. Why? Because this is the time of night that my 9 month old and 2 year old are light sleepers. if you so much as look in the direction of their room, they wake up. So of course, my husband scouting the place out, freaking the hell out of me, wakes one if not both of the girls up. Why else does this suck? Because my 9 month old will still wake up at 430 and insist it's playtime/feeding time. If I'm lucky, I will get back to bed around 1230 which will give me a solid 4 hours. However, did you know that sleep walking tends to occur during the period of the sleep cycle where you are most likely to snore? Yeah. That's awesome. SO almost immediately after deciding the house is safe enough to go back to sleep, Hubby is sawing logs.
So now I am wide awake, scared that maybe he really did hear something. Oh and did I also complain about the fact that us moms have the ability to stay sick for like 3 weeks and still function? Yeah. I'll tell ya, these days I see the video feeds of these nurses with Ebola skyping their families from the hospital rooms and for the briefest second I think, maybe that wouldn't be so bad... Then I realize how it would really go down (I get Ebola, pass it to my kids and husband and probably the dogs too i guess, stay home to take care of everyone and clean up the messes and probably end up dying while attempting to do a load of laundry) and I realize that's ridiculous Heather! You don't want Ebola! But so I am sick. I can't recover because I never sleep. Then I can't think straight when my husband wakes up and tells me someone is breaking into the house. It never ends.
I will be honest. It's been a while since I pulled an all nighter, listening to my husband and dog snore, worried that someone was trying to jimmy a window open, and hacking into my pillow when I am just about to doze off. The last time I did this I wrote my open letter to Frigidaire complaining about the troll in the ice maker and insisting that I didn't need that much ice unless I was about to kill somebody. Maybe the lack of sleep does get to me. After all, if I hadn't come out to write this, one of us probably would have ended up with a pillow over their face.
Yikes! Somebody get me some sleep!!
