Lie-Ins

My husband kindly offered to let me have a lie-in this morning, but the fact that I’m currently drinking equivalent amounts of coffee to pints of blood in my body may indicate that it didn’t go well.

Our eighteen month old woke at twenty past six and screamed, as is his way at the moment.  He also violently shook the bars of his cot, so it was what you might call a rude awakening.  My husband delicately crashed out of bed and threw open the door, sending blinding shafts of sunlight from the window on the landing burning into my sleep encrusted eyes.

After his daily ablutions he eventually took him downstairs, where he cried some more until he got his bottle of milk.  Ah, peace at last, I thought, stretching luxuriously across the bed.  But my moment of tranquillity wasn’t to last long because our other two then woke up and carried out a full conversation right outside our bedroom door until my husband yelled upstairs for them to come down.

I put my head under my pillow and attempted to gently drift back off to sleep.  I tried desperately not to hear what they wanted for their breakfast, or what DVD they wanted to watch, or what toys they were falling out over, but it was all in vain.  They may as well have been sitting next to me on the bed.  The only difference was that I could hear the soothing tones of my husband SHOUTING at them to be quiet.  Thanks, oh love-of-my-life, that helps.  He must have sensed my frustration because that was followed by loud shushing and stage whispering of, ‘Be quiet, Mummy’s trying to sleep!’.

I could hear clearly that our three year old was playing with a Bakugan and our six year old made the fatal error of trying to take it off him.  Cue a SPECTACULAR meltdown; it felt like he was standing next to me, hand cupped round his mouth, screeching into my ear.

I wrapped my pillow around my head, hoping beyond hope that it would go some way towards drowning them out.  It didn’t.  My husband had obviously had the same idea and turned up the television to some decibel that would be unacceptable to the Environmental Health Department.  I thought at any moment that he was going to bring the vacuum cleaner up and put it on outside the bedroom door like my mum used to when I was a teenager, the difference being that she would have done it at eleven and this was only half eight.

I lay trying to think restful thoughts, with the screams, deafening television, shouting, crying, crashing and banging bombarding me, but the only thoughts I could muster were murderous ones, so I gave up and stamped downstairs where my husband greeted me with a cheery, ‘Morning, did you have a good sleep?’.  Needless to say, my response wasn’t quite so cheery 🙂