My husband has a super power. He can sleep like nobody else I know. He is one of those people who falls asleep within 2 minutes of closing his eyes in bed at night. I am not one of those people, so while I lay there with my eyes closed listening to him snore I am equal parts annoyed and amazed (well, maybe it’s more like 70/30 in favor of annoyed).
As skilled as he is at falling asleep, he is even better at staying asleep. Before we had kids we would sleep in on the weekends (the good old days). I would have to work really hard to make myself stay in bed past 9 am. But not Hubby. That man could sleep forever.
Once we had Kiki, Hubby had to let his sleeping-in super powers lie dormant for a while. He had to get up early on workdays and on the weekends I needed his help, so he still had to get up at a reasonable hour. But as Kiki got older, I starting letting Hubby sleep in again. And I was curious to see if he still possessed the supreme powers of sleep that he once had.
It started out as me letting him sleep in when he’d been up with Kiki in the middle of the night or when he’d had a long week of early morning meetings at work. I figured he was just making up for lost sleep in these instances, so I didn’t think I had solid evidence that his powers of sleep remained strong. But it’s now become a bit of a regular thing for me to let him sleep in on the weekends. And I tell you what, that man can still sleep forever.
Usually I’ll let him sleep til about 9 or so before I send Kiki upstairs to wake him up, but sometimes I’ll just let him go undisturbed. This is mainly for the sake of curiosity because I’m just want to see how long he can sleep.
While we were back in The South for Christmas Hubby had lots of chances to sleep in. My brother was particularly bothered by the fact that my husband can sleep so much. He has an almost 3 year-old who regularly wakes up at 5 am and a 3 month-old baby who obviously is not a reliable sleeper yet. I was letting Hubby sleep as long as he wanted and my brother kept trying to come up with reasons to wake him up. “Kiki, breakfast is ready. Go wake your Dad up,” he said. But I stopped her and said that Daddy would eat when he got up. So later he tried to tell his wife, “if you need to look something up just go wake up Hubby and use the computer in his room.” But I stopped the wake up call again by offering to look up what they needed on my phone.
I finally looked at my brother and asked, “it really bothers you that Hubby can sleep this long doesn’t it?” And he said, “well yeah. It really does.” Then I explained to him that at home I would wake him up if I needed help or company but with so many people around I didn’t need either.
At 11:30 I decided to finally sound the alarm and wake Hubby up. I needed to get dressed for the day and he had gotten a solid 12 hours of sleep. Yep, you read that right — 12 hours.
My mother-in-law asked me once if Hubby ever lets me sleep in (I think she wanted to make sure her son was being considerate). I told her that I’m not really good at sleeping in, so as long as Kiki and I doing fine, then I don’t mind him sleeping. Besides, I trade off by getting to slip out later in the day to run errands by myself. So I let him use his super power of sleeping and he lets me use my super power — wasting time at Target.
This Is Parenthood 