Royal Preference

We recently stayed in a hotel for a mini stay-cation.

Of course, sleeping arrangements needed to be discussed and decided long before bed.

I told Bill that I was happy that two Queen beds were the same price as one large King bed.
Call me picky, but I'm kinda partial to the no knees or elbows in my back style of sleep.

Landon pipes up, "I can't sleep in this bed!  I'm a boy!"

I truly didn't have a clue.

Upon further investigation, Landon explained that he was a boy, so he should be in a king bed, not a queen bed for girls.

I explained that it was meant to designate size.

"They should call it an Everybody Bed, then," he decided.

I agree.  And then only you should sleep in it.
Not all of us.

Oh, Never Mind

My family is in a gypsy mode, displaced from our permanent home and still waiting for the next.  This is a good thing, since we sold our home, packed our belongings in storage, and spent time racing around the Front Range looking for a new house like party-goers playing an expensive game of musical chairs.  Just when we would muster the guts to put an offer on one, boom! By morning it was gone; we had waited too long by wanting a mere eight hours to go by before committing to such a significant decision.  Our agent said maybe we should bring the offers to our first look appointments.

As you know from other posts, neither Bill nor I are "fall in love at first sight" kinds of folks.  At least, not with something as big as a house.  Sure, I can be bedazzled by a layered fudge-chocolate-mint-concoction of all things delicious and declare it my instant new favorite, and Bill can see the latest model of something drive by and decide it is worth a serious investigation whether it belongs on our family's dream list for a future car, but this is not the same as being willing to plunk down our entire savings on a twenty-minute whirlwind tour.  Sometimes I was just trying to disassociate myself from the thematic decorating and the unusual pet? smells to really form any opinions at all!

So the process continues. But in the meantime, we have sold our house that was the midpoint between our significant commutes.  We are road warriors, Bill and I, and if it seems melodramatic to you that I would use the word "warrior" to reference my commute, it means you have never been one.  (A road warrior, that is, not a commute)  Bill moved in with his parents, closer to his job in the south, and Landon and I  live with my mom, closer to my job almost two hours north of his.

Until I got the brilliant idea that we should go visit him and all have a slumber party at his guest quarters this last Thursday.  Yes, that's a school night for those of you who don't know that Bill is a teacher. Who thinks these are ever going to be good ideas?!

Well past bedtime we are still trying to get our dearest little boy to settle down and go to sleep. But the house is not his home, and the noises that we can disregard become monumental to my three-year-old.
This transcript seems funny to me now, but at the time I was cringing--would it ever end?!

"I can't sleep!  It's too noisy!  What's that noise?  Daddy, what's that noise?"
"It's a big fan, Landon, go to sleep." (they had an attic fan blowing outside the door of our room)
"A pig fan?  What's a pig fan?  Where are the pigs?  I don't hear pigs."
"It's not a pig fan, Landon, it's a big fan.  It the attic.  Go to sleep."
"What's an attic?"
"Go-to-sleep."
"Why a fan?  What's it doing?  Why it so noisy?  What's an attic?"
"You know, a fan, with blades spinning around, trying to cool us down.  GoToSleep."
"Knives?!  There are knives?  Why there knives daddy?  Are those for the pigs?  It's too noisy.  I can't go to sleep."

Pigs and knives and noisy attic fans.

We might be gypsies with a little bit too much imagination.

The Biggest Decisions

     

     For analytical types, making a significant decision can be an agonizing struggle with points and counterpoints, small considerations and large speculations, long lists of pros and cons and even a middle column for things worth mentioning that may very well be a neutral.  When Bill and I were moving to a more serious place in our dating relationship, we both paid the price our analytical natures exact.  For Bill, it meant reopening his still-active online dating account and taking one last look at the women he had already communicated with, checking to see if anyone else seemed compelling enough to halt the forward motion he was making with me.  He later told me that it settled his heart to see how no one could even spark a little bit of interest when he compared them to me.  I was flattered, and happy to be with someone who understood the gravity of giving your heart to someone.  The same thing happened to me when a good friend suddenly got interested in exploring if we could be “something more,” and I was left weighing a 3-year relationship against the 3-month one I had formed with Bill.  One seemed a steady known quantity, the other, a wild gamble.  Well, you all know I took the wild gamble, which really wasn’t so wild after all.  I couldn’t have told you then how much I would come to love Bill, but I could tell it was totally worth it to me to find out.  (With my whole heart, to the moon and back, it turns out)

     But in those early days those options are real.  And narrowing the choices felt hard.  Watching your life of seemingly limitless possibilities funnel onto one path with one person, effectively removing countless other exciting and interesting options, was a struggle for this single girl who had been free-wheeling it longer than most .  How could I ever be truly sure that this was the exact right person to marry, about whom I would have no misgivings or regrets?  How could I skip ahead to the end of the story and see if I liked the ending (or even the middle 20 chapters, for that matter) before I decided to buy the book and make it my own life story?  The truth is, I simply couldn’t.  It is a leap of faith to read a few chapters of someone’s life, share of few of your own, and decide to be rebound into one volume of a story merged forever for better or worse.  You pray the “worse” won’t be the worst you could possibly imagine and the” better” feels more like the best, and then you live.  And work.  And pick up the pen every day and try to make the book the one you’d want to read if you were looking for a love story of epic proportions, a life of grand adventures, and simple pleasures smoothing the bumpy parts all along the way.

Sleepless, Sheepless

I feel like I am in a scene from a movie, but perhaps one that went straight to video, so the details are not well known to me.

I sit here, past midnight, in a quiet hotel, in a city not far from my own, with too many things in my head to find any mental space to count some sheep and go to sleep.

Even as I write that sentence, I see sheep all starting to bounce around chaotically, mocking me for thinking that they could be of service.  They speak in several languages.  And one wears a green fez.  They are useless, and getting more bizarre the longer I let them take center stage of my imagination.

How anticlimactic is this?!  I suddenly am catching that first little wave of sleepiness.  Past experience has taught me that if I don't follow it out to the sea of sleep, I'll be stranded on this island of insomnia for hours more.

If this WAS a made-for-video movie, this most certainly was one of the deleted scenes, known only here in the Director's Cut.

I'm going to try.
To get some sleep.
Even if I have to bring in a talking pig to herd those bilingual sheep.