Why Not Smothering My Husband is a 2009 Goal

It is exactly 3:32 AM and I am awake typing a blog. Why????? I'll tell you why!!!!!

My husband doesn't have to get up for work until 8:30 in the morning because he doesn't have to be at work until 9-ish. (He's supposed to be there at 9, but he hasn't been any where on time since he retired from the Navy. Even when he was in the navy, the only things he has ever been on time for have been military related. However, that's a subject for another blog.) I, on the other hand, have to be at DBCS by 7. I usually try to jog or go to the gym before work. If it's cold and dreary like it has been this week, I go to the gym. This means I get up at 4:30-ish in order to get to the gym at 5 when it opens. I work out for an hour. I come home take a shower and get my middle schooler up by 6:30 so she can get ready for school and catch the bus. I leave the house by 6:45 (15 minutes is long enough to be sure that Chrissie is awake and going to be ready on time.) Keep this in mind as you determine if you wouldn't be tempted to smother your faithful husband of 25 years to death in his sleep if you were me.

Last night, my husband decided to make mashed turnips. I've never actually eaten a turnip. He's never actually cooked one. But a friend gave us some turnips from his garden a while back, hence we begin the night's saga. Rather than cook them on top of the stove, he used a crock pot. I figured this meant he was going to cook them all night and mash them in the morning. I was wrong.

At about 1:30, EJ woke up and decided it was mashing time. Why would I know this if I was going to be getting up at 4:30 you ask? BECAUSE he left the bedroom door open and turned on the hall light and clomped down the hall. My husband is flat footed and vibrates the whole house when he walks. I stirred, checked the time, and tried to go back to sleep.

When he got to the front room he turned on the tv and put it on some sit-com with teenagers that get in trouble and scream a lot on one of the Nickelodian channels. I think it was Drake and Josh, but it might have been something else. EJ is deaf in one ear and has misplaced his hearing aide because he never wore it in the first place. Everything he listens to is loud...even louder than he needs it. He's only deaf in one ear...not both. Tonight, it was even louder because he wanted to hear it in the kitchen above the mashing of his stupid turnips!!!! A sane person would have gotten up and closed the door, but I just tried to sleep by tossing and turning for an hour.

During one of the tosses, I caught my arm underneath myself and must have cut the circulation off to it. Mercifully (so I thought), EJ finished mashing the turnips and watching tv at 2:30 and came to bed. This is when I realized that I couldn't feel my arm because when I tried to roll over and keep my covers, I couldn't even move it. (I've never completely deadened anything by laying on it like that before.) This meant I had no defence and would have almost no covers by the time EJ took his 4/5ths of the covers. Now I was awake AND cold...again. This is a regular occurrence. I've even tried going to bed with my own separate covers and he ends up with his covers and mine by the end of the night.

I thought, "Oh well, at least it's quiet and the hall light is off. I'll skip the gym and get 3 1/2 hours of sleep. As long as I get 3 hours of sleep, I can function normally." It took less than 3 1/2 minutes before my darling husband fell asleep. Why would I know he fell asleep that quickly? He was laying on his back with his head arched back in a position that would render me unable to walk the next day but for him is the perfect sleeping position. This is also a position that makes him snore so loudly that the pictures on the wall rattle....Ok, that's a slight exaggeration, but I am typing this from the front room and his snoring is so loud that I am tempted to go in the bedroom, turn on the light, slam the door, and yell, "Shut up already!!!!!" He snores almost every night if he lies on his back, but tonight is worse. He is snoring irregularly. Every now and again he takes a really deep snore, kicks the bed, and then clears his throat. Who can sleep with that? When he started kicking the bed and clearing his throat, I knew that there would be know sleep for me tonight, so I got up and am writing about it until the gym opens.

The thing is, what do you do? He is asleep most of the time when he steals the covers. If I get up to pee, he's asleep when he lies diagonally across the bed leaving me no where to go back to sleep on. (This leaves me consciously deciding to hold it throughout the night. I'm past 40. I'm not always going to be able to do that.) He's asleep when he is snoring, kicking the bed, and clearing his throat. He's a discourteous sleeper, but can you really be discourteous if you're asleep? You can't discuss this behavior with him and have it stop. Although, the kids and I have all talked to him about his late night tv being too loud. He says he can't hear and doesn't realize the surround sound system is too loud, but when you turn UP the sound, you have to realize that the volume is louder than daytime listening requires. Logic would would tell you that this is too loud because you are turning up the sound higher at night in a quiet house where everyone is trying to sleep, but you!!!! Besides we have all told him how many bars the volume shows when it is too loud. He can see and count.

My alarm just went off. I didn't smother my husband of 25 years to death in his sleep tonight, so I am currently meeting one of my goals. Although, by the time I come home at 6:30 tonight I'm going to be so tired and grouchy that he might wish that I had killed him last night. When I meet the goal of turning Chrissie's room into his office, I am considering turning it into his office/bedroom. When we said our vows, we never said anything about sleeping with discourteous sleepers until death us do part. (There's that death thing again...I just don't want to be responsible for his death.)

If you ever read this, EJ, be thankful for every night that you survived doing this to me...and...I still love you.

I posted this BEFORE I went to the gym to torture myself on the Elliptical Machine for 45 minutes. I came home at 6:05 and went into my bedroom to find my husband blissfully sleeping on his side. His snoring is tolerable when he's on his side. He looked so peaceful. This was irritating enough. Then I noticed that his kicking had knocked the fitted sheet off of the foot of the bed and thought, "I bet I'm going to have to put the fitted sheet on when I get home and am grouchy and am NOT going to be in the mood!!!!" Then I got into the shower and it occurred to me that I could actually hit him with water using the shower massage nozzle. I would have done this today except I was already naked when I thought of this and I couldn't picture what he would think if a crazed naked hostile wife woke him up from a sound sleep in such a manner. At least now, I know I have another option other than smothering if I have another night like last night.