Things that go bump or blah in the night

It started with a pork roast, but we’ll get to that.

Sleeping next to the same guy every night, in the same room, with the same surrounding noises, has had very different responses over the years.  I don’t think either one of us considers ourselves necessarily a light or a sound sleeper, and on any given day, I just count my blessings that I’m actually sleeping at all.

Such is the life as a parent.

And there doesn’t seem to be any real rhyme or reason as to what jerks me out of a deep sleep and keeps my husband snoring away, or what keeps me in dreamland and has him racing frantically through the house.  There have been times that the mere cough of a tiny infant has had me rocketing up and sprinting down the hall, and other times when a bulldozer could have backed into the kitchen and I would have not noticed a thing.  I’ve also become quite adjusted and able to sleep through his alarm clocks, his late-night business phone conversations, and when he was on the volunteer fire department, blaring sirens and details of calls.  

Likewise, he quickly became adjusted to sleeping through baby cries and when the kids rolled heavily in bed while things like a falling stuffed animal sent me running.

All this seems irrelevant, but really is perfect background knowledge for what made for a long night for him, a sleepy night for me, and a video I hope never goes viral.

Like I said, it started with a pork roast, and more importantly a pork bone.  When my kid asked if he could give the bone to our dog, in a frantic dinner frenzy I said “sure” and didn’t think twice about it.  For the record, small dogs shouldn’t eat giant pork bones, and while she enjoyed it very much going down, it was not quite the case when it came back up.

All.  Night.  Long.

This was one of those cases when my body must have been so tired that I completely shut down all ability to hear a vomiting dog in the wee hours of the morning, or else my brain was smart enough to not wake me up because, essentially, dog barf is gross.  According to my husband, the bone ‘resurfaced’ starting around midnight and kept resurfacing via both ends for hours.  

I woke up in the morning to find the bed empty and figured he must have left early for work or went for a jog, only to find him camped out on the couch with a pathetic dog on his feet and a roll of paper towels and a bottle of carpet cleaner on the table.

“Check your email,” was all that he said.

And when I did, I saw it.  A lovely little self-filmed video sent with a subject of “thanks for your help last night” that has this very script:

“Good morning.  It’s one AM.  The dog has puked twice.  I’m standing out in the hallway outside our bedroom with all of the lights on.  I’ve been scrubbing carpets and where is my wife?  Sleeping through the whole thing.  Let’s go check on her to see if this will wake her up.”

With that, he walks the camera into our room and pans around to display my sleeping self, sprawled out in a sleep so deep that even the a video camera doesn’t wake me up.  In fact, nothing woke me up, as the dog continued to be sick all through the night.

All’s well that ends well, though.  The dog recovered, the carpets were unscathed, the pork roast was delicious, the video never made it to YouTube, and I made my husband a nice, strong cup of “I’m sorry” coffee in the morning.