And baby makes three

To say our sleep schedules are out of whack since having a baby may be the understatement of the year. We spent three days and two nights in the hospital after my c-section, during which time the baby and I were constantly being checked up on—medication, vital stats, fluid output, temperature, incision site, etc. (Just for the record, I apparently have wonder kidneys. They process fluid like nobody's business. Except that for the nurses that actually was their business.) Anyway, with all the hustle and bustle involved in keeping two of  us alive and well, at no point were any of us asleep for more than 45 minutes.

Just sitting up in bed was something of a Herculean effort on my part, which meant Sam was the one checking up on Edith day and night. He had her little crib right next to his bed and was instantly up to hold her if she cried or needed to be changed.

Well, we've been home for a few days now, and while we're not getting tons of sleep, we're still getting some, mostly because my mom has been here to work the front lines. She "sleeps" downstairs where she can keep an eye on Edith and feed her in the middle of the night. Sam, used to taking care of Edith constantly while we were in the hospital, doesn't seem to know what to do with a few hours of uninterrupted sleep, as evidenced by some early-morning exchanges we've had.

Our first night home Sam woke up and sat bolt upright in bed with a wild look in his eyes. He started looking all over the room and feeling around in the bed.

Sam: Where is she?!
Me: She's downstairs

He thought on that for a second before getting out of bed and heading downstairs, apparently forgetting that Edith was safe and sound and being looked after by my mom. He soon came back upstairs and went to sleep, only to "wake up" at least twice more to ask me where Edith was.

Later in the day I asked Sam if he remembered any of the times he'd woken up to look for Edith. He said he had no memory of any of it.

The next night Sam sat up in bed, again wild-eyed and clearly acting out in his sleep. He was staring at the stretch on no-man's land between our two sides of the bed, his gaze travelling up and down its length like a tennis line umpire, before settling on a pile of blankets I had cast off in the night. He patted it a bit, tried to pick it up, then looked very confused.

Sam: Where is she?
Me: She's downstairs.
.....
Sam (thinking hard): Well, what am I holding then?
Me: That's my quilt.

I found this particularly funny seeing as how I'd told him just that morning all about his being up the night before wondering where Edith was. I told my mom and she said, "Poor guy, doesn't know how to sleep even when he has the chance."

Last night Sam woke up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and sat with his back to me, his arms held out in a cradling position. His left arm stayed crooked and stationary while his right moved back and forth in a scooping motion.

Me: Sam?
Sam: Yes?
Me (as gently as possible): Are you pretend-feeding a baby?
Sam (waking up): I think I am, yes.

I like to laugh at Sam when he does these sorts of things, but in truth it's really very sweet that even in his sleep he tries to take care of our daughter. And if I'm being completely honest, the quilt fooled me once as well. I woke up stroking it, thinking it was her soft little hand, before the green paisley print registered in my brain. After that I took it and spread it out so we'd stop mistaking it for a human baby. And if we still do I imagine it will be rather traumatizing. (Why have you flattened the baby and wrapped it around yourself?!)

Some day we'll get the hang of this sleeping while parenting thing.

Horses.

The Preakness Stakes is coming up on Saturday (duh), which means I've got horses on the brain. Tamsen and I were discussing what we might name a thoroughbred if we were to own one and came up with the following ideas:

Pony Brewster
Poni Braxton
Pony Soprano
Pony Shalhoub
Poni Collette
Pony Stark
A Horse is a Horse
A Horse Divided
Speaker of the Horse
The Horse of Representatives
Horsies! Horsies! Horsies!
She's a Brick Horse
Al Capony
Jockey Balboa
Colt From the Blue
Filly-delphia Story
More Than a Filly
Millard Filly-more
Night-mare on Elm Street
Full Horse
Mare the Horse Be With You
Little Horse on the Prairie


Clearly, our horse would be the best horse. Feel free to inform us as to which horse puns we've missed.

I can't seem to find my way out of bed. If you can read this, send provisions!

This morning as I went to throw my tangle of blankets off of myself, I also unwittingly grabbed the waistband of my pajama pants.* A very confusing tussle ensued. I wish I could say I won.

*This is what happens when both your pajama pants and your bedsheets are made of flannel

Bells.

An exchange during a commercial break during Modern Family.

SAM: Man, time for bed, huh?

TAMSEN: No, I have too many shows to watch.

SAM: Well, time for bed for me, then. I can go to bed. I can go to bed with bells on. Which is probably why I'm having so much trouble sleeping.

(TAMSEN gives SAM a funny look.)

SAM: I jingle when I roll over.

Driving.

The drive between our parents' houses and our own house is about ninety minutes, and though she usually tries her best, Tamsen often falls asleep on the drive. (Not that I blame her. I'd fall asleep too, if I weren't driving.) She fell asleep on the drive home last night, and at one point, I felt a gentle poking on my arm. I looked over and asked her, "Hey, what are you doing?"

"Oh!" she said, clearly still asleep. "I thought you were a pillow."

This relationship is suffocating me!

As you know, Sam is, if not a sleepwalker, a sleep-acter-out-of-things. A few months back I woke up to find him sitting up on his knees in the middle of the bed.

me: Sam, what are you doing?

Oblivious to my query (or perhaps in response to it) he picked up his pillow and started beating the wall with it. I chose that moment to scoot as far over to my side of the bed as I could get.

Folks, if I'm ever found beaten to death with a pillow, as unlikely as that coroner's report might be, you know who the culprit is.

Alarm.

School has started for me here in Eugene, but since Tamsen and I aren't allowed to move into our new apartment until October 1, I'm staying with some very kind people in our ward. I drove from Portland to Eugene on Monday morning so I could be in my workshop at 8:00, which meant I had to leave Portland around 5:30. I was pretty tired all day, and by the time I arrived at the house where I was going to stay, I just wanted to fall asleep.

So that's more or less what I did. I set the time on the alarm clock next to the bed, set the alarm, and went to sleep around 9.30. I generally have a hard time falling asleep under different circumstances than I'm used to (I didn't fall asleep until 3.00 the night before because I knew I had to get up early, which only made me even more tired), but I figured I was exhausted enough that I wouldn't have any trouble.

Clearly something went wrong, or else I wouldn't be writing about it. I tend to have a hard time separating dreams from reality when I'm tired, and sometimes I act our my dreams with hilarious results. (See also the entirety of this blog.) This was one of those times, so when you read the following paragraphs, pretend that you're in that half-sleeping half-awake state.

My eyes snapped open at 11.30. I heard a beep coming from downstairs. Oh no! When I set the alarm clock next to the bed, I must have set off the alarm system for the house! I jumped out of bed, turned on the light, and ran around the room clutching my hair saying "oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no OH NO oh no oh no oh no" trying to figure out what to do. I knew I only had thirty seconds to disarm the alarm before it started screaming and waking up not only the kind people who gave me a place to stay, but their entire neighborhood.

So I ran down the stairs, still saying "oh no oh no oh no oh no oh no oh NO oh no," frantically searching for a panel on the wall where I could disarm the alarm. I knew it would be easy to find, since it would have a huge LCD display with a timer counting down to zero. (By my sleep-deprived reckoning, I should still have had fifteen seconds to go, even though I actually spent about two full minutes running around in my room in a panic.) I ran out into the kitchen to see two loaves of bread sitting on top of the oven, having just finished baking.

And then it hit me that the beep I heard must have been the timer for the oven.

And then it hit me that I probably hadn't actually tripped an alarm for the house just by setting an alarm clock.

And then it hit me that I had probably dreamed about tripping an alarm, but didn't realize it wasn't real when I woke up.

And then I was profoundly grateful that no one else had seen me run downstairs in a panic. I slunk back up the stairs, calmed myself down, and went back to my relatively uneventful sleep.

I want you to know, when you hold my hand, you hold my heart

A month or so ago we couldn't fall asleep, so what did we do? We listed all the phrases we could think of with "heart" in them and replaced the word with "fart."

Here is a smattering of what we came up with:

You're so hard-farted

She wears her fart on her sleeve

Open fart surgery

A member of the lonely farts club

Queen of farts

Let's have a fart to fart chat

This cereal is so fart-smart/fart healthy

Fartburn

Brokenfarted

Wild Farts Can't Be Broken

Fart attack

Be still my fart

Fart of gold

Eat your fart out

A change of fart

I have to follow my fart

Fart and soul

I had my fart set on going to the circus today

Absence makes the fart grow fonder

Cold hands, warm fart

In my fart of farts

Near to my fart

Fart failure

C'mon, have a fart!

Fart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The Planeteers: Earth ,Fire, Wind, Water, and Fart

The American Fart Association

Achy Brakey Fart

The faint of fart

Crazy Fart

My fart's all a flutter

Learned it by fart

Cross my fart and hope to die

The way to a man's fart is through his stomach

Bless your fart

A man after my own fart

Bleeding fart liberals

Farts in Atlantis

A fart-felt apology

The Tell-Tale Fart

Faint fart never won fair lady

Yeah, we're real mature.

plugged up

I snore, so I got Sam some earplugs to wear. He'll put them in at night only to find them out in the morning, but we know they aren't falling out, because they'll be placed neatly, side by side on his nightstand. Apparently he can take them out in his sleep. He doesn't do it as much now that he knows about it, but they still fall out on their own sometimes. This morning I found one of his earplugs in the bed, so I tried to see if I could put it back in his ear without him noticing. As you can imagine, I was not very successful.

Clementine.

Tamsen leaves a bit earlier for work than I do, so she wakes me up and gives me a goodbye kiss before she goes. She usually says something goofy, too. This morning, she was singing, "Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my daaaaaaarling Sam-u-el."

I got up enough to give her a kiss and tried to think of something clever I could say back. After a bit of thinking, I settled on, "Don't be lost and gone forever, blah blah blah, blah, blah blah blah." Not that clever, but it would do for first thing in the morning.

Except I didn't hear her respond. I opened my eyes and found that a full 20 minutes had passed since she left.

The sea monkey has my money OR Tales of sleep talkers

A while ago I came into our room and started talking with Sam, only to find that he wasn't really awake. But he'd been talking back. I didn't know if he was sleep talking or what, so I decided to test him.

Me: Are you awake?

Sam: Yes.

Me: No you're not, you're asleep.

Sam: I am not asleep.

Me: You are too.

Sam (defensively): I am not!

Me: Okay then...what's your middle name?

Sam (a little too quickly): Sam!

Me (laughing): Your name is Sam Sam?

Sam: Wait, no. I meant...

Me: Ha! You are asleep. I knew it!

At this point all the talking made him wake up and he was sulky all over again (this time legitimately so) for being accused of being asleep when he wasn't. One of my sisters talked in her sleep growing up, which was maddening because as I was getting ready for bed I'd ask her something like "did you set the alarm?" and she'd assure me that she had when she actually hadn't. I used to grill her too, asking her if she was actually awake of not, but she was quite convincing and could carry on whole conversations, so I was often taken in. Although, that's nothing compared to my other sister who somehow managed to answer her phone in her sleep and talk to her best friend for 15 minutes before she realized anything was amiss. It went something like this-

H: Hello?

A: Hey, were you asleep?

H: (groggily defensive, because she actually is asleep) No! I'm awake.

A: (confused) Oh. Okay. How was the beach trip?


H went on to tell her all about the ward beach trip before introducing the subject of tigers.


H: And then we were divided into groups and we were the tigers.

A: Wait, what? After you got back you were tigers?

H: What? No, the tigers turned into T-shirts.

A: The tigers were T-shirts?

H: The T-shirts were T-shirts!

A: What T-shirts?

It was at this point that my sister woke up to find herself in mid conversation with a phone in her hand, and she very legitimately asked "Wait, what T-shirts?"

Tuesday snooze day

The other morning I was awakened by what I thought was the sound of the garbage truck coming down our street (the garbage man comes on Tuesday). Sam later informed me that in my half-awake state I muttered "Oh. It's Tuesday" before going back to sleep. Unfortunately it was Wednesday and Sam stayed awake for hours trying to figure out what day it actually was.

Step on a crack.

Conversation between Tamsen and I after I accidentally and not on purpose pushed too hard on her back while she was laying in bed reading:

SAM: Sorry for breaking your back.
TAMSEN: Yeah, you may as well be out stepping on sidewalk cracks.
(pause)
SAM: You're not my mother.
TAMSEN: Thanks, P.D.

Old shoes.

Tamsen and I were laying in bed talking, when I felt a burp well up. (This happens, single people. Don't over-romanticize your dreams of married life by imagining a world devoid of bodily functions.) I let it out, and almost instantaneously saw an errant hair on my pillow, which I blew away. Poor Tamsen had her mouth open as I accidentally and not on purpose blew my burp into it.

"That tasted like old shoes full of pepperoni," she commented.

Sawing logs.

Tamsen came down with a cold yesterday, so she wasn't feeling so great. We did our best to pump her full of chemicals (cough drops, Nyquil, etc.), but she was still pretty stuffed up when we headed to bed. I should have thought about the potential consequences of that before falling asleep, but I was pretty tired, and thus just dropped off.

Around 4.30, I was woken up by what can best be described as the sound of someone shoving live weasels down a watery drain. Burble clonk snorfle. Morfin slobber chong. What the crap was that? I opened my eyes to see Tamsen sleeping blissfully on her back, emitting noises that could have woken the dead. It was hardly her fault, since her nose was all stuffed up, but holy cow already. Normally if I jostle her a bit, she rolls over, but after several attempts of bouncing up and down, picking up and dropping her pillow with her head on it, and running into her, nothing was working. I ended up abandoning ship and sleeping on our couch. I couldn't hear Tamsen anymore, but I ended up having to deal with our surprisingly loud clock all morning. Lovely.

Apparently Tamsen woke up a couple of times when I was pushing her around, but she assumed it was because I was snoring too loudly. Good grief.

Call me Pandora

I've been having some very strange dreams lately, and by strange I mean mundane. For instance, a few weeks ago I had a dream that consisted of nothing more than me working in a factory. I stood by a conveyor belt that had boxes on it and as they came by it was my job to take an exacto knife and cut open a box. First I'd slice through the tape on the top, then along the sides, and finally I'd open the flaps to make sure I'd cut all the tape. And that's all I did all night in my dream was open box after box after box. After box. After box. I guess it's my version of counting sheep.

Then two nights ago I had a dream that entailed me mixing a giant tub of egg salad with the longest rubber spatula that doesn't really exist because it was a dream. And every so often Sam would come by and add some cornmeal to make the egg salad look yellower and I'd have to mix it in and get rid of the white patches I could see of unmixed egg salad. I was strongly reminded of the Calvin and Hobbes comic where Calvin is counting rocks in his dream and bores himself awake.

Last night I broke my streak of boring dreams with a crazy dream that involved winning $36,000 and shooting a home intruder in the head. Apparently my dreams are boring in order to save up for more exciting ones every once in awhile.

Concave

This Christmas break we stayed at Tamsen's house, since their guest room has a slightly larger bed than mine does (i.e., queen vs. full). However, when we arrived at her house, we found that the frame of the bed was bent outward, leaving the bed in a bit of a U-shape. It wasn't bad enough to warrant any sort of complaint, though, so we figured that was that.

The trouble, though, is that while sleeping in the bed, one tends to roll toward the center, making things difficult for the second tenant of the bed. More than once, I woke up to find Tamsen nearly shoving me out of the bed because she'd rolled to the middle. One time, I decided to gently nudge her back to her side by bumping into her. Nothing happened, so I tried again, this time a little harder. Still nothing. Eventually, I was really throwing myself at her, over and over, which she later told me was the point where she woke up. Somewhat groggily, she made her way back over to her side of the bed, and I rolled back to mine in peace.

It all seemed like a good idea at the time, but the image of me repeatedly rolling into Tamsen at high speed thinking "MOOOOOVE" seems pretty ridiculous now.

An elephant never forgets

The other day I woke up to the sound of elephants. I thought that there were 5 of them specifically -it was early and I was a bit confused, but I distinctly heard the trumpeting of elephants so I turned my attention to our upstairs neighbors who are usually very needlessly noisy. They have rock band, an excellent stereo system and a tendency to use them both when we're trying to sleep. So I groggily turned to listen and thought I heard not only elephants, but very rhythmic elephants. There would be two counts of silence, a very distinct trumpeting, and then it would repeat -I was reminded of the scene from the Jungle Book where the elephants are marching. Did the neighbors have some sort of elephant edition of rock band?

I turned to Sam to see if he was awake, only to find that he was the one doing all the trumpeting. He'd breathe in for two seconds and then he'd exhale with a lot of fanfare -I'd found my elephant. Safari over. I thought about getting something to record the noise with -it was quite impressive -but decided to stay in bed. I went to sleep comforted by the fact that I'm not the only sleep wheezer in the family and making plans to patent my elephant edition of rock band.

Time.

Last night, Tamsen and I were talking about looking at the clock when we wake up. Like most people, we have trouble telling exactly what time it is when we first get up, and usually badly misjudge the actual time. (True story: once, when I was in middle school, I woke up, looked at the clock, and decided the time was Saturday. Turns out it was actually Tuesday, and I was extremely late for my bus.) Sometimes our efforts to determine the time turns the numbers on the clock into different shapes (such as snakes). My particular problem, however, has been long recurring and I still haven't learned.

You see, when I first wake up, I can check what time it is WITHOUT ACTUALLY OPENING MY EYES. That's right. Early in the morning, I can see through my eyelids, provided I'm looking at a clock. More than once, I've woken up, realized how tired I was, and thought to myself, "I'll just check the clock through my eyelids this morning." Invariably, the time is several hours earlier than I actually need to get up. And then, after a minute or so, I think, "Nah, I'd better go ahead and look with my eyes open, just to make sure." Strangely enough, the time is usually vastly different, and usually requires me to leap out of bed and scramble to get ready on time.

The strange thing is that it never strikes me as strange that I can see clocks through my eyelids until long after I've been awake. I'll think about it later and realize that I'm bordering on insane in the mornings. Unless, somehow, I really do have a super power, in which case I really ought to put together a costume or something.

You know it.

Spirits were high throughout the day yesterday, but once we got home, both Tamsen and I were pretty much exhausted. Too much turkey and pie had finally caught up with us. As I crawled into bed next to her, I said, "Are you ready for some hard-core sleeping action?" Tamsen tried to reply, "You know it!", but got derailed by a yawn and instead said something along the lines of "Hoo note!"

Somehow, it wasn't quite as hard-core as either of us were hoping it might be.