My daughter may not look like I was even in the room when she was conceived, but there are several indications that no one else on earth could be her mother, a few of which include: 1) she can burp louder than a low-flying F-16, 2) her dazzling ability to simultaneously hold her breath and scream when she doesn’t get what she wants, and 3) the fact that she always wakes up in the morning at the opposite end of the bed than the covers.
Jon had no idea what he was getting into when he married a woman who cannot sit still in her sleep, and this is my formal apology to the man who EVERY SINGLE NIGHT has to fear what body part will end up in his ear, usually my elbow. In fact, I have a bad habit of raising both my elbows and my knees into the air and catching them right before they fall, over and over and over again, all in my sleep. Jon has taken to gently pushing my leg back down into the mattress because for starters the constant jerking motion is a BIT ANNOYING, and sometimes what I think is the mattress is really the lower half of his body.
Turns out I’m a big twitcher, too, and this may explain why the dog has stopped sleeping in our bed. He’ll sit at the foot of the bed until we turn off the TV and indicate that we might be going to sleep soon, and then it’s as if he cannot get out of there fast enough. Often he will give Jon a parting look that says, “You’re on your own, buddy.” With the twitching comes kicking and violent jerking, and when your arms are as long as mine are you might as well just stick a rotating 10-ft propellor in bed. Have you ever tried to snuggle with a propellor? What about one that SHOUTS OUT OBSCENITIES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT? It’s real cozy.
It doesn’t help that Jon wraps himself in the covers like he’s about to be airlifted and abandoned in Antarctica — he will deny this, and blame me saying that I’m the one who tosses off the covers with my twitching, but I’m Heather B. Armstrong and This is My Website, so my version of the story is the only version. In order to procure any warmth during sleep I have to inch closer and closer to the Blanket Burglar, but instead of sharing the covers he inches closer and closer to the other side of the bed. By morning he is literally dangling off the mattress by his fingertips, my elbow in his ear.
Seems I have passed on my acrobatic sleeping to the child because no matter where we position her in the crib by morning she is squashed up against the top of the mattress and the covers are in a wadded mass at the opposite end. Sometimes she is so far wedged into a corner that I have to PRY HER OUT which is hard because the crib is on wheels, so when I pull on her body the force of her head wedged into the corner pulls on the crib, and I look like a monster pulling the crib around by my baby’s head.
I know a lot of families make the decision to share their bed with their kids, but LORDY am I glad we decided against that early on. Have you seen the size of that kid’s hands? She’s going to need separate beds for her hands alone. Besides, our bed isn’t big enough for a twitcher, a six foot three inch cocoon, and a head wedger, although it would be nice to be able to blame someone else for my nightly outbursts: yeah, that scream you just heard, the one that went, “No, YOU FUCK OFF, YOU COKE WHORE!” That wasn’t me, that was the baby.