Seriously the most rediculious of all things

Last night a man and women went to bed. They are married. They love each other. They have two children. The man considers himself fairly bright and reasonable. Sure there are occasions that he does something a bit crazy, but nothing like buy a convertible at the age of 41. Really, wouldn't that just mean that he's having an affair and really, with his hair line, what good is a convertible.

Now this man and woman live in a nice, but small house. The house has barely enough room for the four people and one dog to live. It's the sort of house that's always cramped; smells sort of like a mixture of wet dog, wet basement, and old clothes – some might call it lived in and others might call putrid. It could be nice if it weren't for the four people's and one dog's stuff spread out in a sort of way that makes it appear like a garage sale. It's the sort of house that one can't walk in if anything is out of place, which is actually how the house looks on most days.

So in this house the man and woman found themselves with a dilemma: how to manage to move out of their room and sleep somewhere else. The house itself is a two bedroom house (you can already see the problem, can't you). There is one bedroom for the older child and sleeping in there is really not an option. If you think it is I will just remind you of a prior posting with a description of sleeping with her and how it was compared to an alligator killing its prey. The upstairs is also not an option as the man has found that there is little joy in sweating profusely while at the same time sucking down sheetrock dust. The basement is not an option as it was learned the humidity level is at 90 percent, essentially the equivalent of a tropical rainforest and with all the similar insects and creepy, crawly creatures. This leaves the living room.

And that's where Andrea and I found ourselves last night. I really don't mean to go on about Jonah's sleeping, but quiet frankly there is little else going on in our lives. Sure we both work, have another child and are trying to be involved in about a thousand other things. But the reality is that nothing happens that doesn't reference his sleeping and as such I write about it.

Last night we gave it one final effort as he has started to not sleep again. But this time he's not so cute. In the past he used to cry and whine, whimper and roll around. Sure it was annoying and sure it kept us up a bit, but we didn't have people from bordering counties coming to our door to protest the racket. He has now taken to screaming, full-on, blood curdling, ear drum popping, screaming. I don't know from where he gets this, but crap it hurts and really he just needs to stop. The only thing to which I can compare it is to imagine the most annoying dog barking and yapping all night without stopping to breathe and it's next to you in bed wanting to snuggle. Yup, that might be the same or maybe not quite as bad.

So last night we decided to sleep out of the room to see if our presence in the room was contributing to his night waking. Andrea says I can be noisy. She says that I have this habit of stretching in the middle of the night and making all sorts of noise. I say what she's hearing is actually me getting up and trying to find things to stick in my ears to stop the noise. Things like cotton balls, knives, arrows. Those things don't work.

What we ended up doing was having a slumber party in the living room Poor Mia was so jealous. I got the couch. The wonderfully old, smelly, probably bug infested couch. Andrea got the brand new, cute and comfy bean bag bed (which, by the way, is child sized and not long enough for adult legs). And then there was no way at all to walk around the room, except over Andrea and the fear at that point is that I will step on her face, which may actually cause her to scream just like Jonah, and thereby void any efforts we made at sleeping in the living room.

We have done this two nights in a row now. Has it helped? Actually it seems to have helped a bit. I mean, child protection did not come on the second night after being called by neighbors that we were doing mean and terrible things to our children. So there was slightly less screaming. We will keep going with this plan and see what happens. Maybe tonight I will tell a ghost story. You know the one . . . the one where a young couple moves out of their room and ends up sleeping in the living room . . . maybe you've already heard it.