I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

As you may have noticed, Luca and I joined my parents this last week for a mini family vacation to go see a rocket launch at Vandenberg AFB.  It was your typical family vacation affair, where everyone piles into the Family Truckster and in true Clark W. Griswold fashion, Dad proceeds to scream at traffic and curse the imaginary forces of Evil which have clearly swarmed in on him, delaying our arrival in what he deems a reasonable amount of time. 

When we finally arrived in Lompoc (yes, that’s actually a name of a city), we found out we had to be on the bus to the launch facility at 9:40pm, and would arrive at Vandenberg by 10:00pm.  Luca was so excited about the whole thing that I couldn’t help but be excited too.  This initial excitement waned a bit when they announced that the launch “window” was 12:00-2:00am, and that we had a minimum of 2 hours to kill in an empty airplane hangar on a chilly night. 

Luca does not do well with waiting.  In fact, he complains if the wait at Disneyland is more than 15 minutes, and typically won't wait more than 30 minutes in line, before he opens up his map agitated, and begins planning our next move. It was a chore to keep him entertained for 2 hours. 

Needless to say, we survived, and finally, the big moment came!  And then, unfortunately, it passed.  There was a problem, and we were left waiting out in the cold, foggy night air for the problem to be resolved. 

We waited.  And waited.  And waited some more.  Then around 1:15am, they finally “scrubbed”, or cancelled the mission, and we waited yet again, this time to be driven back to our hotel. 

We arrived back at the hotel around 2:15am, and everyone was exhausted.  I was particularly spent because of the aforementioned entertaining of said energetic 7 year old, and because I had worked 2 nights before this and had not recovered and gotten back on a regular schedule yet.  By the time we got back I had been up for nearly 24 hours, and you’d think it would be easy to sleep, but you’d be wrong. 

This is why:

Within 10.4 seconds of the light going out, my dad was already snoring.  I don’t mean snoring as in moderately loud and annoying, I mean snoring as in once we taped him on the answering machine, which was located down 30 feet of hallway, and joked we couldn’t hear the phone because he was snoring too loud.  Even with earplugs shoved into my ears, as far as they can go without actually touching my brain, it still sounded like he was operating a buzz saw into a bullhorn 4 feet away from my aching head. 

This in and of itself would make it unbearable and unlikely that I would sleep, but this was not my only hurdle between me and blissful unconsciousness.

The next big challenge to glorious sleep was that I was sharing a bed with Luca.  And, while I know some of my mom friends out there sleep with their children and consider it a magical bonding experience, I assure you, you wouldn’t be warm with maternal love if you slept with Luca.  Let me explain.

Sleeping with Luca is much like what I imagine sleeping in a mosh pit would feel like.  It’s kinda fun at first, but after awhile you are just hot and tired of being beat up.  No matter how large the bed is (we were sleeping in a Queen), he is right there, pressing his little body against mine, and breathing on my face.  I scoot over 3 inches, and Luca expands into the empty space like the blob.  I move to the foot of the bed to breathe some non-recycled air, and within minutes, he finds me like a heat seeking missile.  And it’s not just the whole breathing on my face thing that makes sleeping with Luca unpleasant, it’s the fact that it’s only a matter of time before I get kicked, or elbowed, and usually in the face. 

Observe: the feet were both in my back when I got up to take this pic

Usually I make it about an hour before I get up and look for another place to sleep.  On the few occasions that I have attempted to slumber elsewhere, that whole heat seeking missile thing happens, and I awaken from a dream that I am being trampled by the bulls in Spain.   Most nights, I end up trying to get back in bed, but the challenge then becomes finding a spot to lie down in, as Luca is no longer simply lying in the spot he just pushed me out of, but now spread-eagle across the entire bed.

So you see what I was working with here, and why after taking 3 of Luca’s “night night” mints (Melatonin), I just barely managed to begin falling asleep, a mere 90 minutes later, somewhere in the neighborhood of 4:00am.  And, as you can probably guess, it was around this same that time that my mother finished doing whatever the hell it is she does in the bathroom for hours and hours on end, and begins rummaging around the room like a bull in a china shop.  After several mysterious crashes, and the lights turning on, she is finally ready to go to bed, and switches on her sleep apnea machine.  Yeah, the Darth Vader machine. 

It’s now 4:30am, and I’m sharing a room with the human buzz saw, Darth Vader, and a rolling stone.  Thankfully my body gave out and exhaustion won out sometime around 5:15am, and I finally got some sleep.  It’s a good thing too, because at the stroke of 7:00am, Luca was awake and needing me to turn on cartoon and listen to him as he told me important things like the changes he would like to make to the Ferrari Italia.  Fortunately for me, I have mastered the "SNOW" skillset (Smile, Nod, "Oh Wow!"), and was able to impersonate a real, living mom with very little difficulty. 

I have also mastered the skill of walking with my eyes closed and putting on some coffee, so I was able to deal with my complete lack of sleep with relative ease.  Who needs sleep anyway?  I'll sleep when I'm dead.