Fear Files

Get Up Now

This happened 2 weeks ago. Thought you all could use a chuckle.

I am a mother of two babies, born 11 months apart. My eldest will be 2 in October. My youngest turns 1 next month, already! As you can guess, I am exhausted all the time but I am very happy to be!

For what transpired to make sense, I need to explain the sleeping situation a bit.

It is customary for the children under 3 to sleep in the same room with mom and dad, so that they can be cared for quickly, and sent back to sleep. My son has his own bed, away from our bed a bit. Around 5 am every morning, he wakes up crying. I change his diaper, let him have some water from his sippy cup, and he's ready to go back to sleep, but on my side of the bed. I take our daughter to his bed and lie down with her. This gives me a chance to lie on my left side, since she can lie next to the safety rail, I don't have to box her in between myself and my husband, with me lying on my right side, to prevent her from falling out of bed.

Before everyone goes crazy warning about co-sleeping, please understand I have every precaution in place, plus I'm very in-tune with my children, and the slightest movement, or lack of movement has me wide awake. The slightest whimper, and I'm up and comforting whichever baby made a peep.

Now, onto the experience...

I had switched places with my 22 month old son, and settled down with my daughter in my son's bed. My daughter woke to nurse, and I accommodated her. I fell back to sleep. My son decided to wake up at 5:30 AM rather than the usual 7:30 AM, for the day. He came over to poke his sister and wake her up. She started giggling, and they were talking in their baby talk language. Pretty soon my son comes to the foot of his bed and climbs up by my feet, and begins bouncing (spring mattress) to try to get me up. I groaned, "Baby, mommy's tired. Please climb back in bed with daddy and go to sleep?". I switched onto my right side, placing my daughter near the wall, and having my back against the safety rail. She settled down to nurse and my son had gotten off his bed and stood over by my hubby. He's saying, "Dad? Dad? Daddy?". Needless to say, my hubby slept through that. Suddenly I hear my son say, "Mom?" and the foot of the bed begins bouncing rhythmically. I thought it was my son attempting to get me out of bed, but I hear his voice behind my head, and urgency creeping in, "uh oh, uh oh, mom? Mama? Uh oh." and I said, "Baby, please stop bouncing and lay down in mommy's bed?" and the bouncing increased.

I moved my left foot a slight bit and felt a super warm toddler (or so I thought) body against the top of my foot. My son is reaching through the safety bars, tapping the side of my face, "Mooooooom! Moooooom!", in drawn-out urgency. That was it! I was wide awake! I didn't attempt to look, I just said in a loud, calm voice, "Okay! I'm up! I'm getting up!". The bouncing stopped immediately. I got onto my hands and knees and crawled backwards to get out of the bed at the foot, and reached over the rail to grab my daughter and hold her to my chest, grabbed my son's sippy cup off the dresser and we headed out of the bedroom. As I looked at the clock on the living room wall, the time was 6:02.

While I was making breakfast, I did my normal routine of looking out the back door window at our little garden. Then I had seen it. The heirloom tomato plants had been blown over, and one was uprooted and looking pretty Us'ica (in a bad way/shape;pathetic). I turned off the stove and went outside to fix the tomato plants. My son came outside with me and after all the plants were once again back to normal, he touched a leaf on each plant and made a kissing sound. Once he was satisfied he had kissed all the tomato plants "boo boos", we went back inside and washed our hands together. By this time my hubby was up, asking what happened, and of course, the whereabouts of breakfast. I told him about the tomato plants, what had happened to them when we had a swift, windy rain storm around 5-5:30 AM. I didn't yet tell him about what happened in our bedroom. He said, "Ah! That's why a nature spirit was waking us all up.".

He laughed a hearty laugh when I told him of my experience in bed! He said the nature spirit shook him awake and told him, "Go help your wife!", so he had thought something bad had happened to me, and that's why he got out of bed without the smell of breakfast prompting him to wake up.

For the rest of the day, the top of my left foot had a hot (felt like sunshine was always on that spot) sensation where it had touched our visitor.