Last night I had an experience that is just too weird to not tell some one. And I feel like writing and I cannot think of anything else at the moment, so this is what you get!
At about 1:30 a.m., I saw my little boy, Devin, standing next to my bed. He was saying, “Daddy, daddy. . .” Daddy had gone down stairs to sleep on the couch because, our bed room is upstairs and it gets really hot, and as he told me this morning, “I was sweating my ass off!” (Last I checked, his ass is still there, however, and I am a cold-blooded female so I have no idea what that means).
Anyway, Devin then turned around and walked down the hall toward the living room. I assumed I was dreaming and went back to sleep. It is not often that I sleep deeply enough to dream, that is a gift from my ever restless mind, but when I do, my dreams are pretty crazy, so this was actually normal for me.
About a half hour later I woke up and looked into the doorway of my bedroom, and I could see Devin’s two little feet poking through the doorway. When I went to him, he was lying on the floor, cuddled up with his “blankie brown,” sleeping in the hallway.
OK, so do I just let him sleep, or do I try to wake him up and get him back to bed? I whisper his name a few times, and he rolls over and looks up at me, still mostly asleep. I ask him if he wants to go lay down, and he stands up and nods his head yes, then follows me into my room. He starts to climb into my bed, and I am too tired to care and instinctively want him to sleep with me so that I can keep track of him.
I rubbed his little fuzzy head for awhile, something I always do to my kids when they are scared and having trouble sleeping. We went to sleep, snuggled together, it was probably pretty cute.
A bit later I woke up again (yes, it is completely normal for me to wake up 8 times a night. No wonder I am so tired during the day), and he was no longer in the bed with me. I assumed he had gone back to his bed or down stairs to cuddle with daddy, and went back to sleep.
My alarm goes off at 6:30 on Tuesday mornings, because on Tuesdays I don’t need to wake the kids up to take them any where, and this morning when my alarm went off and I sat up, there he was again, sleeping side ways at the end of the bed.
I am so confused. Where was he when I woke up and he was not there? When did he come back? How did I not wake up when he got on and off the bed? I wake up when the neighbors sneeze. OK, not that bad, but pretty close.
I wonder if he was sleep walking. I know I did a bit of that when I was a kid. I remember one night in particular I was staying the night at my grandparent’s house, and I got out of bed and walked to the doorway to their bedroom and said, “I like chocolate ice cream with sprinkles.” And it’s true, I did then and do now, I mean, who doesn’t right? But why would I get up in the middle of the night to announce that to people I knew were fast asleep?
The summer after the eighth grade, several of our class members went on a trip to California. We went to Mediaeval Times, SeaWorld, Universal Studios, the San Diego Zoo, etc. One morning, my roommates told me that I had been talking in my sleep. I told them to turn off the TV, though the TV was not on, and then I said, “I’m in a cage and I can’t get out, but that’s OK, I can stay here forever.” Freaky!
Aria will randomly sit up and look around while she is asleep. That is pretty close to the scariest thing you will ever see, screw scary movies, wait ‘til you see your kid sit up in bed, open her eyes, look around, then lay back down and know that she won’t remember it the next day because she was asleep the whole time.
Some times when I go to check on her at night, her eyes are half open. I am not sure how she sleeps like that, but she does. And she talks in her sleep too, I can never tell what she is saying, but she can carry on quite the conversation the wee hours of the night while she is asleep.
Is it a genetic thing? Does everyone do that kind of stuff? Mike doesn’t, but I have never seen anyone fall asleep so fast or sleep as deeply as he does, it is incredible. What is that like, sheesh?!
But now I worry that Devin is going to wake up in the middle of the night and go totting down the hall and fall down the stairs and I will sleep right through the whole thing. He has gone down stairs in the middle of the night before, and been just fine going down the stairs, but I guess it is normal to worry.
What if, when he gets older he decides to unlock the front door and go for a nocternal stroll in his SpongeBob PJs? What if he wakes up at 2 a.m. and subliminally says, “Now would be a good time to go out in the front yard and catch that June Bug I saw earlier!” How will I explain that to The Fuzz? “I don’t know what happened, officer, he was in bed the last time I checked.” Hmmmmm . . .
Oh the things you never ever thought you would have to worry about. . .