Saturday, August 05, 2006

Be careful what you say when you're asleep

The boy has a habit of talking in his sleep. It's not a case of dozing peacefully and then suddenly yelling things like "Watch out - there's a monkey in the swimming pool!". When the boy sleep talks, it sounds just like he's woken up.

Many times now I've called on him in the wee hours of the morning, to fulfill his promise to resettle The Little Madam when she cries out in the night. And many times he's answered by sitting up and telling me he's onto it. And then talking to TLM as though she were in the bedroom with us, before resuming his deafening snore.

At first I didn't realise that the boy wasn't actually awake at these times; once I did, I got into the habit of shoving the monitor to his ear with the volume all the way up. At least anything he said after that came straight from a conscious mind.

Early this morning at around 2.30am TLM cried out, as has been her habit of late, so I prodded the boy as politely as I could and asked him to get into gear. I wasn't expecting the verbal abuse that followed. The word "obssessive" was used and I'm sure the "F" word too. TLM eventually went quiet again anyway, but I couldn't get back to sleep for ages because I was so mad at the boy for being so unsupportive. Mean, even.

I was still mad at him this morning when he stuck his face in the kitchen, where'd I been taking care of TLM since about 6.30am. But the anger was pointless, because the boy claimed to remember nothing of his nighttime misdeeds.

Or is it just another dad's ploy to get out of childcare duties and avoid retribution? Hmmmm?

5 comments:

Jon said...

OMG!! Did he really say 'watch out, there's a monkey in the swimming pool?' That's too cute and funny.

My ex told me once that, when he asked if wanted breakfast, I replied with 'I'll take a pound of cheddar and a tin of beans'. I mean, WTF is that?? Did I morph into some British grandmother in 1950s England? We don't say 'tin' here, we say 'can'. That was too funny as well :-)

Violet said...

Actually, no - he didn't say anything as cute as that jon. If he only said stuff like that I wouldn't have to be mad at him in the morning :-)

Perhaps you'd been watching BBC tv shows that evening?

Anonymous said...

I apparently do this too. Once I apparently woke up my first husband, clearly and succinctly said "There are 18 people in the world with O-levels [16+ exam in UK at the time] and only 4 of those have A-levels [18+ exam]." We then proceeded to have quite a long conversation in which we remembered all the people we knew who had O-levels and A-levels (ie, all of our familes, our respective schools etc etc etc) and the reasons most of those would not count towards my totals. I was asleep the whole time.

I think there's a PhD in there somewhere for me

Watson Woodworth said...

My first fight with ST, back in 1993, I answered the phone and dealt with the caller and hung up. When she asked me what the call was, I had woken up finally but could tell her nothing of the call I was just on. This was not a satisfactory answer.
I still don't know what that call was.

Violet said...

I recall my brother's friends telling me what he'd say in his sleep. So this is obviously in The Little Madam's genes on both sides. Perhaps her night-time cries are simply baby-talk for "Your're gravely mistaken, sir - there are in fact no spare bananas and in any case your car is too small."