In the Still of the Night

It started around 6:00 a.m. I had gone to bed quite late last Saturday night, around 1:30 a.m. Jason was with some friends out of town and wouldn't be home until around 3:30, so I stayed up and watched Peyton Manning on SNL before going to bed. Once in bed I tossed and turned; I remember the clock striking at 2:00. I drifted off to a restless sleep until Jason came in somewhere between 3:30-4:00, and then I finally settled into a deep, comfortable sleep...that is until the beeping started. It was one shrill beep, every 30 seconds. I know it was every 30 seconds because after hearing it the first 10 times, I decided to pass the time listening to it by counting the seconds between the beeps. My body was too tired to do anything about the beeps, but too awake now to ignore them and fall back asleep. After 10 minutes of the beeps I couldn't take it anymore. "Jason, wake up. You need to do something about the smoke alarm." I had heard the beeps earlier in the day and after 5 minutes of standing in my bedroom trying to figure out the source, I discovered that it was the smoke alarm signaling that the batteries were dead. Noone is going to call me Sherlock Holmes anytime soon. The smoke alarm must quit beeping after awhile because after the kids and I got home in the evening after being at my parents' house, it was no longer beeping and I had forgotten about it. Making a smoke alarm stop beating at 6:00 a.m. in the morning when we've only been asleep 2 hours is the man's role in our household (at least it is now.) I wish someone would have been filming Jason trying to stumble across our bed and reach up at our 10 foot ceiling to knock down a smoke alarm after being asleep for 2 hours. It wasn't a pretty site. He finally had to go downstairs, get the step stool, climb on the dresser, and take the smoke alarm apart. Ahh, silence...until the alarm went off 45 minutes later to get up for church.

There aren't too many more frustrating moments than when sleep is interrupted in the middle of the night (or early morning.) With so many possible interruptions, it's a wonder we EVER get a full night's sleep. Here are some examples.

1. The very loud thunderstorm. When I was a kid, during a loud thunderstorm I would crawl into my parents' bed and sleep in the middle. My kids sleep very soundly; in fact, I can't even remember one time that either one have awakened during a storm. However, I still wake up, and with the anticipation of the loud boom after the lightning, I keep the covers pulled over my head and can't go back to sleep until the thunder (at least the very loud thunder) has stopped.

2. The sick kid. Anna is the one we have to tend to in the night sometimes. With her breathing issues, when she gets a cold she can really hack through the night, and we've had to give some middle of the night breathing treatments. Elizabeth never wakes us up - in fact one morning when she got out of bed she had vomited in the night and didn't even know it. That was almost worse because of the dried stuff in her hair and, well, you get the point.

3. The sick adult. This happened to me last Thursday night. I went to bed feeling 100% fine, but at 1:00 a.m., the pineapple banana orange juice I had before bed was not sitting well. I tossed and turned for around 10 minutes until I headed to the bathroom for the inevitable. Trips at 2:00, 4:00, and 6:00 followed.

4. The bed wetter. While vomit will not wake up Elizabeth, a wet bed did when she was younger, and it wakes up Anna. This is a double whammy because not only do I wake up, but I have to work, too. Strip the kid, put new clothes on the kid, strip the bed, pull out the pull out couch and get blankets for a new bed.

5. The mysterious noise. What was that? Did I dream the noise or did it wake me up? Is someone trying to break in? Is one of the kids sleepwalking? My body tenses up as I anticipate hearing the next noise. "Jason, did you hear that?" One night quite a few years ago I woke up to a mysterious noise and had Jason go all through the house (and even check the closets) to make sure there wasn't a robber in the house (another man job in our house.) When these types of noises happen, my body breaks out into a cold sweat and I can almost work myself into a panic. I start planning escape routes. First I'll hit the burglar over the head, then I will head to the kids' room. Irrational, I know, but it's 3:00 in the morning.

6. The bad dream. I am a very vivid dreamer, and many of the scenarios in my dreams involve bad things happening (this was actually a former post of mine.) I often times am jolted awake and then lie there thinking about what just happened.

7. Squirrels in the wall. We live in a very old house, and sometimes creatures can be heard running in our walls. One summer we had a squirrel visiting, and in the middle of the night we could hear him feasting on nuts inside a wall in our bedroom. Jason got out of bed and figured out the squirrel's exact wall location and was ready to pound on the wall when he all of a sudden turned and leaped onto our bed. "The squirrel gnawed a hole in the wall." Great, I thought, we're going to have a squirrel in our bedroom tonight." We stuffed a pile of clothes in front of the "hole" and went back to sleep. The next morning we checked the "hole," only to see it was a shadow.

8. The telephone ring. Most people who know us know we like to sleep in late on the weekends. People who don't know us will call very early in the morning, and the ring of the telephone can be very startling. Phone calls very late at night when we've already gone to bed are also startling. My first thought is, "What's wrong?" Why else would anyone be calling at this hour unless something is wrong.

9. The startling thought. Maybe I forgot to e-mail something to my boss. Maybe I forgot to tell Jason that I have to work late the following day and he needs to run the kids. Maybe I forgot an appointment earlier that day. When I was in 5th grade, it was the realization after I had gone to bed that a six week project was due the next day and I hadn't even started it.

10. The house alarm going off. When I was a kid, we had a house alarm, and my brother, the very early riser, would forget to turn off the alarm when he would get the newspaper. As a child, I already had fears of the dark and of people breaking in our house. When the house alarm would go off while everyone was in bed, I would hide under the covers until I knew everything was okay.

For those of you reading with babies, I know sleep interruptions for you can be a nightly experience. I think that is one of the most frustrating parts of parenting a baby because being well rested is so important to feeling good the rest of the day. Fortunately, that time is short lived, and sleep interruptions become more the rarity instead of the norm.

In our house, when it comes to kid related sleep interruptions, Jason and I have unwritten rules as to who takes care of what. I'm in charge of bed wetting and nosebleeds, he's in charge of breathing treatments and random crying. As to who puts the child back to bed when it is a random visit to our bedroom, that varies. I guess whoever gets to sleep later the next morning has to get up.

I am pleased to say, though, that after a short restless night of sleep on Saturday night, last night we had a nice, long, peaceful sleep. We are on Spring Break this week, so the girls and I celebrated by sleeping in until 10:00. Jason, however, is not on Spring Break, so he had to get up to go to work. Thankfully we had no random visitors to our bedroom last night - I would have had to get up.

The Things People Say

Last night our family went to a family night sponsored by our church. These nights are so much fun because the kids go off and play together and the adults can sit around and chat and play games. I was talking to a friend of mine (who shall remain anonymous because I didn't get permission to share her story) who relayed a comment that someone had made to her in college about the way she ran. Several years later, she still remembers that comment when she runs. That got me thinking about the different comments people have made to me throughout the years, some complimentary, some innocent, and some purposefully mean, that still stay with me today and either affect the way I feel about a certain characteristic of mine or make me feel quite self conscious when that characteristic is displayed.

For example, I had just started wearing makeup in high school. I put on some makeup one night to go to J.C. Bodyshop, our youth group, and when our youth sponsor's wife saw me, she asked me if I had a cold because my cheeks looked flushed. I don't wear a lot of makeup now, but if I am going to put blush on, I put it on very lightly because of that comment.

When I was a freshman in college, we had visitation nights every once in awhile in the dorm where guys could visit our room. My friend Ryan was visiting us one night, and I happened to be wearing a white pair of shorts and a white t-shirt. I will never forget him telling me that wearing white on white is a faux pas (spelling?), and to this day, I have never worn white on white again. In fact, I almost don't even buy white shorts or sweats because since most of my t-shirts are white, I don't know what I will wear with them.

I have another freshman example. The first week of college, I was in the student center, and a guy that I thought was pretty cute asked me to play ping pong with him. Each time we would try to start the game, I would win the first point, and he would say, "Okay, now we are going to start the game." Not wanting to argue with the cute guy, but also wanting to win, I kept saying okay. After about the tenth point, he said to me "You are so cocky." He was calling me cocky because I obviously thought I was going to beat him if I kept letting him start the game over (I did know I was going to beat him.) That comment has stayed with me since then, and when I am in a competitive situation (with someone other than family,) I try overly hard to not come across as cocky. Oh, and the cute guy ended up being a real jerk anyway, so I am glad I beat him easily.

In high school, one comment from my assistant basketball coach completely changed the way I played basketball. Up to that point, I was mostly known as and used as an outside shooter. However, my junior year, I needed to step up my game and produce in other areas of the game. In practice one evening, I pulled down an offensive rebound, and instead of going back up strong with the put back, I kicked it back out to our guard. I will never forget her yelling at the top of her lungs, "Porter, quit being such a wimp and put the ball back in the basket." Here I thought I did a great job grabbing the rebound, but she was getting on me for not going beyond what I thought I could do. From that point on, I became a much more aggressive player, and in college, many of my points came from offensive rebounds (because each time Jill S. got the ball, I automatically got myself in rebounding position because I knew she was going to shoot.)

I remember in college talking to Dr. Huffman at length one day about my future and if social work was really what I wanted to pursue a career in. I was feeling inadequate in my ability to be a good social worker, and I was wondering if I should have gone into a field where success in the job is measured more concretely. I said maybe I should have been in a field that uses math, where I know if I have gotten the right answer or not. I will never forget Judy saying to me, "Deb, you are scared to become a social worker because you think you have to be the best social worker in the world or you will fail. You don't always have to be the best at something to be where God wants you to be." Her saying that made me realize that just because I am not the best at something doesn't mean I am a failure at it, and I don't HAVE to be the best at everything. I'll have to admit, I still struggle with that because I am so competitive, and I am not the best at anything, so I have to continually remind myself of her words.

My brother had a funny recollection of a comment. He said when he started junior high, someone said to him "I'd rather be dead than be a redhead."

Elizabeth, my 7 year old, was crying one day after school this past Christmas time. On the bus on the way home, the bus driver was letting volunteers sing Christmas songs in the microphone. Elizabeth wanted to sing Rudolph, but two lines into the song, the older kids on the bus started to boo, so she stopped. As a third grader was exiting the bus, he turned to her and said, "You are a terrible singer." This crushed Elizabeth. Elizabeth isn't the best singer in the world, but she isn't the worst, either, and I certainly don't want her to ever feel self conscious as a child about singing. Needless to say, I wanted to find that little boy and tell him a thing or to, but I realize that this is the first of many times that my children will here something negative directed towards them, and they will have to remember the positives instead. Since Jason and I are still the ones directly influencing our children the most, it is our responsibility to keep building them up so their self esteem can handle stupid comments from kids.

I would relay some of the positive comments people have said to me through the years that have made an impact on me, but since I don't want to come across as cocky, I won't.