"Lie Still!"

Some of my great childhood persecution stories involve sharing a room with my mother. If I so much as twitched under the covers I'd hear a hiss of "lie still!" She was grammatically correct even at two in the morning. My sister Sarah and I both developed coping skills to deal with this. We'd lie in bed waiting for mom to roll over, then we'd quickly move to a more comfortable position, hoping against hope we'd finish moving by the time mom did, because if we rustled around a second longer we'd get hissed at. Our other option was to move v-e-r-y slowly, milimeter by milimeter, in the hopes that if we moved slowly we wouldn't make any noise. The worst was when we were half-way through a move and got stuck, either because mom stopped moving or because we were hissed at. We'd have to lie there, waiting for our next opportunity.

Our two-week trip through California in 1987 when all four of us shared a hotel room was excrutiating during the nights. I solved the problem by sleeping on the floor many nights. This allowed me to move without rustling the bed AND let me escape Sarah's middle-of-the-night thrashings. She was a restless sleeper.

We can tease mom about this now.

Turns out this was all good training for being a mom. My mom is here for the week while Brandon is on his annual canoe trip. Mom is sleeping in Campbell's room, so Campbell is in the porta-crib in my room. Last night Lily came in at 2am to tell me she'd had a bad dream. I kissed the dream away and sent her back to bed. Unfortunately, Campbell woke up. He didn't cry but just inched around the crib making little noises. I lay very still in bed, hoping he'd go back to sleep. After about ten minutes, I just had to roll over. He heard me moving and started yelling. I was busted. So I got him up, fed him and put him back in bed. I left the room for ten minutes so that he'd fall asleep and not hear me moving around.