Our time in England has been decidedly marked by sleeping difficulties in the realm of Andrew (that’s the right-hand side of the bed). Bizarre dreams aside, I am not sure what contributes to this faux insomnia. It may be due to caffeine consumption during the day, or electrical wires reverberating their energy out from the walls and into my brain, or that an incredibly petite wife inexplicably becomes enormous in the middle of the night such that I find myself all-too-often forced to the edge with wiry, sharp limbs jammed into uncomfortable areas of my body, or a chemical imbalance, or perhaps the temperature irregularities instigated by the near freezing air-temperature on any Nottingham evening coupled with the comforter stuffed with goose down, burning coals, Satan’s dandruff, and powered by steam heat that wife insists on using I am unable to discover a comfortable temperature balance, and thus sleep uninterrupted. Who knows? But my current state of sleeplessness is not the focus of this entry, though it is in part the cause.
You see, several nights ago, I found myself awake in the wee hours of the morning spasmodically shifting positions in a desperate attempt to find the elusive and mystical slumbering position. Not realizing how near wife had moved to me in the course of the night, I rolled my entire body sharply to the left, aided by the weight of my enormous head, and met another force with the apex of my forehead. The fact that it did not yield to the advances of weighty cranium, coupled with its warmth and the “Ow!” that issued forth from the vicinity of where I made contact was an indication that I had indeed headbutted wife in her sleep. In the midst of the turmoil, I could only simply echo her voice and collapse back in my minuscule sliver of mattress. I am not able to divine for certain, but either the satiation of violence or the blunt force trauma quickly put me back to sleep. It seems that I have found my sleeping solution.
Nocturnal Cranial Magnetism
The next day, wife had a distinct memory of the early-morning assault and noted that I had successfully affronted her skull without so much as an apology. I assured her that it was an accident and that I do not bear full responsibility for what happens in the grogginess of semi-sleep… and that it may happen again, should the need for sleep arise.
Later that same day, wife sent me a carefully composed song set to the melody of “Little Bunny Foo Foo.” We will close on this and with a rightful victory for wife:
Little mandrew Andrew shuffling through the bed sheets
Cuddling next to Bethany and bonking her on the head.
Down came baby Jesus, and he said,
“Little mandrew Andrew, I don’t want to see you, picking on little Bethany and bonking her on the head.”
A Bungalow in Sherwood 