Sleep and Weird Noises

A bit of FYI business before I move on to my main post.

I am wrapping up review season with the TOS crew...so there will be quite a few reviews coming your way in the next few weeks.   Some of them are exclusively for homeschoolers, but some of them can make great supplements for your public school kids too.  So, don't write them off automatically.


I had intended to get up this morning, have my 5 minutes with God and leave the house to write.  It was a really good plan.  When I went to bed last night I realized that I actually didn't need to set my alarm because nobody needed to be anywhere in the wee hours of the morning...and no extra kids/babies needed me this morning.

I was so excited.

Rainman and I slept from 10 p.m. until 8:00 a.m. at our bed and breakfast and were shocked at how good we felt when we got up.  We could have slept for hours more, if we didn't have to be adults. ( I wonder if some of it had to do the fact that even if there was a weird noise or something, we knew we weren't the ones that had to deal with it.)

It felt so good.  I was super excited to get that kind of restful sleep in my own bed.

I didn't get to bed quite so early last night...it was probably 11 or so before we were all tucked in our beds where we were supposed to be.

Rainman and I had some nice pillow talk and off to sleep we went.

Ahhh.....

Until the beeping started at...hmmm....I would say 1:00 a.m. or so.

I knew just what it was too, because it had scared the kids earlier in the week when it started beeping in the basement.

It was our First Alert Carbon Monoxide detector.  It had gone off earlier in the week in the basement. Of course, I was the only adult home....so we opened the doors down there...set the reset button and waited.  It stopped beeping.  All good.

Then a few days later, it did it again.  It got to the point that the kids were afraid to go in the basement.  They started going down 2 by 2 whenever we needed anything from down there.  (It made me laugh because our basement is heaven compared to, say, my Grandma Braastad's creepy basement - starting with her steps where someone could grab your ankles through the back.....)

I didn't panic too much about it beeping (even though the kids had read the back of the thing where it said to call 911 and were in a bit of a panic) because logically, I couldn't figure out why it was going off - since we had had windows open with the nicer weather.  When I had it in the basement, it was sitting right next to our dehumidifier, so I thought maybe that was the problem.  I decided to do an experiment and put it upstairs, in our kitchen.

It didn't go off for days....until 1:00 a.m. last night.

Of course.

This time though, I wasn't the only adult at home, so I woke up Rainman to help me handle it.  He got right out of bed and headed to the basement, while I tried stopping him to tell him I had moved it into the kitchen.  It was a comedy of errors with us both stumbling around, squinting at things trying to figure out why it was being so stupid in the middle of the night.

We couldn't figure it out because it was plugged in right under an open window.  I went back to bed about the time Rainman got out the screw driver to pop that sucker open and take a look inside.  LOL  It is nice when you can trust someone enough to head to bed and let them handle it.

He was gone a really long time.  Long story short, he did a little internet research and the 5 chirps every minute we were hearing meant that our detector had reached the end of its life and needed to be completely replaced.....not that we were about to become a sad news story.  So, he just unplugged it and chucked it in the garbage.  We mumbled to each other that we would have to add that to our list for Lowe's (that and batteries for our smoke detectors....which we remembered we had just taken a few of them off the ceiling when they beeped and we didn't have replacement batteries for)

Ahhh....sleep.....where are you?

Rainman, of course, even though he had been up...in the light...and reading on the computer...fell asleep almost immediately.  Took me a little longer, but I did too...until.....the next round of weird beeping/chirping started at 3:33 a.m.

This time it was Rainman's cell phone that he had forgotten to charge - emitting its.."hey....you need to charge me" annoying tone....that I seem to be the only one to hear...and it is always....always...in the middle of the night.

I flopped out of bed and went and plugged it into the charger mumbling about never getting to sleep. Rainman, who had awoken at my dramatic cover flop, looked at the clock and reassured me that it wasn't even 6:00 yet, so I would be good.

Men.

I didn't actually wake up this morning until 8:30 when the light from the sun actually hit me in the face.  It was great, and weird....I am almost always out of bed when it is dark.  It was honestly very, very strange.  Plus, sleeping in like that messes with my alone time/quiet time.  A-man was already up doing school when I came into the living room.  So, it has just been a weird morning, but one where I can honestly say, I appreciate having a partner in life with Rainman,  for those times when even if you don't want to, you have to be an adult.

I went back to bed last night and started thinking about my kids....especially D-man and A-man having to be the brave one that checks out the weird noises or even to be the one that stays up getting to the bottom of the weird noise, so their wife can go back to sleep with the full confidence that they will handle it.

I hope and pray that all 4 of my girls end up with a nice, brave fellow adult to face the weird noises with too.