You've Been Talking In Your Sleep

A. appears to be taking after his dad in nocturnal utterings. He will wail or complain unintelligibly about something from his crib, and by the time I get there, he's zonked out again. Now I've gotten smarter and wait a few moments before getting up.

G. does this too, but he usually speaks clearly, more or less. He tends to do it when he's overstressed or really tired. He often falls asleep faster than I do, and of course it usually happens just as I'm falling asleep. He rarely remembers it. Let's revisit some of my favorites from the past:

1. We were dating, and I was pushing him for a commitment or exclusivity or something. This was after 8 months of dating so it's not like I was being unreasonable. But although he is now a reformed commitment-phobic male, at the time he was freaked out. One night, out of the blue, he leans up on one elbow and tells me forcefully, "THE RULES HAVE ALL CHANGED!!" Then he flopped over on his other side and went back to sleep. That was the first time.

2. A recurring theme is him waking me up to see if I'm OK. He'll grab me, shake my shoulders and say, "Are you OK??? Are you OK?? What's wrong? What's happening?" At first I thought I'd stopped breathing or something, and it completely freaked me out. When I'd say, "Yes, I'm fine," he'd flop over and go back to sleep. He never remembered it the next morning. Occasionally I'll answer with, "NO! STOP WAKING ME UP!" with little result. I call these the Midnight Welfare Checks.

3. Another repeating theme is his fear of me falling off the bed. This is not grounded in reality - to my knowledge, I've never fallen off any bed. But he'll grab me as I roll over and say, "Don't fall off the bed!"

We've had variations on this - one time he said, "I SAID, don't fall off the bed!"

Me: "I am not going to fall off the bed!"

He displayed his belief in my sleeping technique by getting up, walking around to my side of the bed, slipping his hands underneath me, and standing there.

Me: "What are you doing?"
G: "Making sure you don't fall off the bed."
Me: "GET BACK ON YOUR SIDE!"
He did, and again remembered nothing the next day.

Another variation, which has happened at least twice, involves me telling him once again in the middle of the night that I have no plan to fall off the bed, and him saying, "OK," and pretending to let it go, but when I roll over and have my back to him, he'll quietly put his hand on the back of my T-shirt and grab a handful of shirt to hang on to. Very sneaky, his ways of keeping me on the bed. Because you know I like to live on the edge. Such a risk-taker, I am.

When he does it a couple nights in a row, I'll say to him before we go to sleep, "I am NOT going to fall off the bed, just so you know." It seems to work - he's never done it on a night that I've reassured him.

4. One of the 384 reasons we don't co-sleep: A. was just a few weeks old and he was usually sleeping in a bassinet next to our bed, but occasionally, if he was having trouble sleeping or I was really exhausted, I'd nurse him in bed and he'd sleep between us. One night, G. jumps up and starts tearing through the bed sheets.

"Where is he?? Where is he?!"

"OH MY GOD," I thought, "he put A. in the bed and I didn't know and now he's lost in the sheets and he's probably suffocated!" So I jumped up and started digging too. As I did, I woke up a bit more and said, "He's not in the bassinet??"

G: (looking over at the bassinet) "Oh. Yeah."

Yep, flopped back over and fell fast asleep. As you might imagine, I did not. It probably took at least until A's next feeding for my heart to quiet down.

5. We then purchased a snuggle nest just so there was no danger of losing A. in the bedsheets. It turned out that in his snuggle nest, he was a bit of a bed hog in our queen bed, and for once there was the real possibility of me falling out, but we were trying to be good attachment-parenting people.

So A's a few weeks old, I'd finally succeeded in nursing him to sleep, and was just falling to sleep on my own, when G. sat up, picked him up (waking him, of course) and cried, "Help! I need help!" (no kidding)

Me (jumping up): "WHAT? WHAT HAPPENED?" You might notice that I often speak in capital letters when awoken in the middle of the night.

G: "I couldn't tell if he was breathing!" By this time A. was wailing, eliminating any concern about his lung function. I also knew by this time that G. was sleep-talking because his voice was clear as a bell - when he's really just waking up, he sounds a little groggy. But when he's sleep-talking, he looks and sounds wide awake.

Me: "Oh my GAWD! You don't wake him up!!" Got up and went to the bathroom as an alternative to strangling him.

Me (coming back): "If you want to check his breathing, you watch his chest or you see if air is coming out of his nose. IF HE'S BREATHING, YOU LET HIM STAY ASLEEP."

G. apparently woke up while I was in the bathroom. The next morning he said he couldn't figure out why I'd come back from the bathroom yelling at him.

We had no problems with A. having apnea or anything, but every parent checks to make sure their infant is breathing. I understand that. But especially if you're freakin' asleep, you don't wake the baby up. So we stopped co-sleeping soon after that. Even our crunchy doula said that was probably a good idea.

6. G. jumped spread-eagled on top of me in bed, and cried, "Everyone stay still!" I turned my head to ask what's going on and he repeated, "I SAID, EVERYONE STAY STILL!" So I threw him off me and told him to go back to sleep.

7. A regional example in Florence, Italy: "Watch the saint's board! The saint's board!" (urgently pointing at the corner of the room) "See! The saint's board!"

Me: "What do you want me to do??"

G: "It's gonna...we have to...we have to stop it."

Me: "What do you want me to do??"

G: flops over and goes back to sleep. He actually remembered this as part of a dream where there was some sort of electric board lined with saints (not unlike the colonnade at St. Peter's in Rome) and it was lighting up the saints one by one and apparently if it got to this one part of the board, something terrible would happen. I appreciated that he could give me some sort of context for the saint's board because usually I'm on my own trying to figure out what the hell he's talking about.

8. Recently, he sat up on the edge of the bed, and just sat there. He never does this consciously, so I knew it was a sleeping thing. I asked, "What are you doing?"

He replied, "I'm waiting for the Superheroes to arrive."

Me: "OK, you let me know when they get here."

G: "OK." Flops back into bed and sleeps. I can't fall back asleep because I'm giggling and really wishing I had a tape recorder.

9. Last, most recent one: "We are all gentlemen because....because...."

Me (intrigued): "Why?"

G: grunts, falls back to sleep.


G's gonna love this entry. I don't mean to cap on him, but except when it happens several nights in a row or nearly causes a heart attack, I find it pretty amusing.