The Bedroom Shuffle

It all starts out normal enough. My son curls up in his tiny toddler bed covered up with stitched dump trucks and front end loaders all over the the quilt. The motif is repeated on the lamp and the hooks and pillows and such. After the three of us read stories together, my little girl goes to her flowery room and climbs the ladder to slide beneath a hand-made quilt of mix and match flower prints and grasps the coordinating pillow she's had since before she was born. They fall asleep quickly and all is well in the world. My husband and I check on them again before mom and pop retire to the master suite for a mid-winter slumber.

If we're lucky, the "bedroom shuffle" doesn't start until 3 or 4 a.m., but last night it started just after midnight. My son comes up and scours around for what I might have left on my night stand as a midnight snack. Satisfied that there's no soda, chips or chocolate left, he climbs in next to me on the side near the edge and falls asleep immediately. I, of course have trouble going back to sleep and eventually move him on the other side between my husband and me, stop worrying he'll fall out of the bed and go back to sleep.

For a little while, anyway.

I swear I've been asleep for all of three minutes when my daughter comes up, scours around for what might have been left on my night stand as a midnight snack, sees her brother in bed, assumes he's beat her to it and climbs in between him and me. My son squeals, I pretend to be asleep to avoid conversation (I use to think my husband was pretending, too, but I think he can actually sleep through all of this!). There's more squealing going on so I move my son back to the other side of me and things calm down. I think I fall back to sleep.

For a little while, anyway.

My daughter gets too hot sleeping between the two of us and starts kicking covers off of all of us. She inadvertantly kicks my husband and I guess he wasn't pretending to be asleep because he gets up and goes off to sleep somewhere else for the rest of the night. I go to that private place in my head and think about a time when "bedroom shuffle" had a whole other meaning and smile to myself in the dark...I'm remembering the bedroom shuffle of a violinist who practically seduced me while I was conducting him in an orchestra. Hmmm...where is my husband, anyway? My reverie is broken with a jab to the nose by a tiny elbow. That's it. I get up and go searching for another place to sleep.

I look for my husband. Oh well, he's completely out in my daughter's slide/ladder bed with the flowered quilt and rainbow canopy. I go to my son's room and skip the toddler bed (all of 4 feet long) and drop into the daybed we had set up for grandma's visit a few months ago. I immediately fall asleep.

For a little while, anyway.

Before long I feel a warm body next to mine...is it the violinist? Oh! Wait, that was another life...so long ago and so far away. Is it my husband? Has my son returned to his own room? Nope. It's my daughter who's come to look for me. I pretend to be asleep to avoid conversation and eventually wake up to find it's 6:30.

We all converge at the breakfast table. No one is happy with their respective night's sleep. The tiniest guy with the tiniest bed is disturbed to wake up alone in the biggest bed...and the rest of us are sore from being cramped up...or kicked or jabbed.

Fortunately, it doesn't always go this way. Just four days ago I was bragging to my friends at lunch that we were all sleeping in our own beds every night--and it had been that way for a long, long time. I guess I should have knocked on wood because four nights in a row, the bedroom shuffle has been all the rage at my house.

At breakfast, as I down my third quadruple-shot latte (yeah, four shots at a time really only makes sense at home--a controlled environment for my mania), I notice my husband is missing a button right in the middle of his shirt. I point this out. Turns out he knows and that's why he's wearing the shirt today. Oh how far we fall after marriage. My mind flashes on the violinist's crisp shirts--even the morning after. Of course we didn't date long enough for me to see how far he'd fall...I grab a glance at myself in the mirror. It's the morning after a big Oscar Reception where I was done and I do mean done. I look like Medusa where my hair was teased so big and whereas I had on a trendy-cut boucled wool suit fitted to perfection, today I'm wearing flannel pajamas that are too big and the drawstring bunches up the fabric to make me look 15-months pregnant. I giggle to myself as I wonder what the violinist would think of that and my family looks appreciative that I can giggle after spreading the table with stacks of pancakes, bacon and eggs sunny-side up.

If I don't get some relief from the bedroom shuffle tonight, I won't have any giggles left in me tomorrow, you can bet. One solution might be starting where we eventually end up...