Rantings of a sleepy dad...

At 3:18 AM this morning, I had just under 2 and a half hours of sleep. That's when I heard the coughing, followed by, "Mom-my!" then "Dad-dy!"

My youngest son was awake and I knew he wasn't feeling good. So, I went in his room and got him. He was warm, but not hot and he was coughing pretty good. It still wasn't time for his cough medicine, but I decided to give him something for the cold I could hear in his chest. If I put him in the bed with my wife and I, all three of us would have been awake, so I decided to go downstairs to my favorite spot for coughing kids in the middle of the night - the sofa. I propped him at a comfortable angle on a throw pillow in the corner of the sofa, covered him in a blanket and laid down alongside him. He stopped coughing but was still breathing kinda' funky. I could still hear a little rattle in his chest. I decided that I'd give the medicine 30 minutes to work, before I step my Doctor Daddy game up.

So, there I was at 3:30 in the morning, in the dark, wishing I was the one that was congested instead of my boy. As I watched the minutes tick away in the green glow of my VCR, I couldn't help but be amazed at the millions of sounds a house makes in the middle of the night. Floors creak and crackle as the temperature outside drops degree after degree. The refrigerator makes a loud click sound before the motor kicks on - I'm not sure I've ever even heard the refrigerator motor before. My wife has some wind chimes out back that were banging like Grambling's band versus FAMU at halftime.

Then at 4 o'clock on the nose, my resting eyes where shocked wide open by a loud bang behind me! I had an instant adrenaline rush that prepared me for the horde of monsters from my childhood that were about to leap from behind the sofa to devourer me. They weren't going to harm my son, because as everyone knows - monsters don't eat kids, DUH. But I was ready for Freddie Kruger, Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, JAWS, Micheal Myers and Jack Nicholson [whatever his name was in "The Shining"] I was amp'd and ready to stand down whatever caused the loud sound. Then, I used my Hyper Sensitive Daddy Record and Re-Play God-Gifted Sound System and I was able to quickly replay the sound I heard, filter out the light haze of sleep, triangulate the direction, duration and volume of the sound and determined that it was NOT a nightmarish horde of villains, but was instead my oldest son dropping his big plastic HUMMVEE out of his bed. He was obviously stirring about and knocked the toy out onto the floor.

Noticing that my son was breathing a little better, and I probably wouldn't be getting back to sleep, I allowed myself to imagine who I would have enlisted to help me fight off the Freddie Kruger lead assault. My immediate roster of Allies consisted of: The Incredible Hulk (The REAL Hulk - Lou Ferrigno], Bo & Luke Duke [w/The General Lee], K.I.T.T. [w/o Michael Knight], Mannix and Danno. While I don't expect many people under 35 to remember Mannix or Danno, suffice it to say that I have put together a mighty group of characters to do battle in my living room at 4:00AM.

I never did make it back to sleep.

Maybe that's why I just wrote this...

TSBM