Hey! Cowboy!

My husband and I are amazingly compatible, and we share many characteristics. However, when it comes to sleeping habits we are polar opposites. I'm a night person. I come alive at around 10:00 p.m. and can easily stay up until the early hours of the morning. Even when I force myself to go to bed early, I'm good for nothing before 9:00 a.m. Don't ask me to do anything that requires thought before 8, and don't talk to me at all if it's before 7. If you attempt any contact whatsoever with me before 6, may God have mercy on your soul.

Eric is completely the other way around. He loves the morning and wakes up with a smile, ready to conquer the world. This, of course, makes me want to punch that smile right off of his perky, ambitious face. He gets up at the unearthly hour of 4:00 a.m. - get this - because he wants to. He has complete control over his work schedule and he could go in at 9 or 10 if he wanted to, but he does his best work early in the morning, so he's up and going several hours before the crack of dawn.

At night though, he becomes just as useless as I am in the morning. This used to frustrate me, because I would love to stay up and have deep conversations with him like I used to with my college roommates. I've tried and tried, but have finally come to accept that after 9:30 or so it's not going to happen. And forget lying awake in bed talking; once his head hits the pillow, it's all over. I'm doing my best thinking just as he slips into a coma.

Now that I'm not working (aside from this little project of building a functional human being inside of me) our schedules have drifted even farther apart. I can sleep as late as I want to in the morning, which means I can also stay up as late as I want to. The other day when I woke up around 10:00 a.m. I realized with a shock that I had spent more time sleeping after Eric had gotten up than before. I had been in bed for a mere two hours when he got up to start his day. I would feel guilty about this, except I really do I get a lot done in those late hours. I have twice as much energy than I do during the day and I get at least twice as much accomplished.

While I would prefer to have Eric awake with me at night, I've discovered something almost as fun: listening to him talk in his sleep. He does it pretty much every night. Usually it's about work. He's a network engineer, so I hear him mumbling about a router, a switch, or an IP address. He's currently on contract at the FBI doing top secret stuff, and he worries that he'll reveal something to me that I shouldn't know. Luckily I have no idea what any of it means; even when he's talking coherently about work it goes right over my English major head. So he probably won't have to kill me.

Once in a while though, he'll talk about something else, and the fun ensues. A few times he's spontaneously shouted hilarious and uncharacteristic phrases like "Holy moley!" or "Hot diggity dog!" Often I can ask him questions and he'll respond to me. Sometimes he'll even sit up and open his eyes, so that I think he's awake, but in the morning he doesn't remember a thing. And as of last night, we have a new winner. I was curled up reading when he suddenly yelled in a mocking tone, "Hey! Cowboy! No one should be that country." Wise words from my husband in the middle of the night.