Weird Sleep

We do not sleep normally at our house, for the most part. I'm a night owl, although less so than I used to be. Gorgeous Wife always gets sleepy before me, especially with her fibromyalgia medication. My daughter doesn't complain about going to sleep, but she will often stay awake for a while making funny noises and apparently trying to wake up our son. She also will sometimes wake up in the wee hours screaming at the top of her lungs. My son usually sleeps fairly normally, but it's disconcerting to wake up to him crying at night, go in his room and see that he's still fast asleep.

A funny thing happened last week. If something goes wrong with servers at work, we get a notification message on our cell phones, and we take turns being the primary “server babysitter.” Last week was my week, and shortly after we went to bed, an alert came in, warning about a minor issue. As I picked up the phone to look at it, Gorgeous Wife, who was sick and therefore even more tired than usual at that hour, told me that the light from the phone was going to keep her up. I told her I would try to make it quick. She rolled over and, one minute later, with the light from the cell phone still shining in the dark, she was asleep.

Odd sleeping habits run in my family. There were times we'd discover my dad asleep with the television blaring. If you turned it off, he'd wake up and say, “Hey, I was watching that.” As a small child, Sister used to sleep with one arm hanging upright in the air. One of my brothers once sleepwalked out of our room, down the hall, into the family room, up two flights of stairs, into the kitchen, down another hallway, into my parents' bedroom, around the bed to the wastebasket, dropped his pants, took care of business in the wastebasket, then went back to bed.

So if you're a guest at my house or that of one of my relatives, be prepared for a little weirdness at night. And having a plastic liner in the garbage can wouldn't hurt.