The ol’ falling-out-of-bed switcheroo

I thought we had finally made it past the whole falling-out-of-bed stage—and, after the multiple heart attacks Jayna gave me during her whole getting-used-to-sleeping-in-a-bed-instead-of-a-crib phase, it was quite nice to finally be free from sleeping with a little case of nitrate pills around my neck.

I mean, it had to have been at least two months after she first began sleeping in her new bed before I finally felt it was safe to move the couch cushions from their temporary home on the floor around her bed back to their customary location on the downstairs couch.

But all that was in the past now … or so I thought.

Because it had been many weeks since the last falling-out-of-bed incident, I was very much caught off guard when I heard a body hit the floor a couple of nights ago … but my reflexes apparently are still intact, because within .023 seconds of hearing the sound, I had launched myself to the top of the stairs.

As I pushed Jayna’s door open, I scanned the floor around her bed … and was a bit alarmed when I didn’t see her. Upon further inspection, I realized she was still in her bed, sound asleep.

And in the split second it too me to think, “Huh …?,” I quickly turned around and looked across the hall to Zan’s room, whereupon I saw him semi-prone on the floor, struggling to sit up as he fought his way through a mixture of sleep-induced fog and “What the fuck just happened?” surprise.

Are you kidding me? Now I gotta worry about him falling out of bed again?

I scooped him up in my arms (no easy feat, since the boy currently weighs as much as a baby hippo) and comforted him for a moment before putting him back to bed.

And then, so that I could drift off to sleep without worrying about which one of them would be the next to launch themselves onto the deck and cause my adrenaline-soaked heart to leap out of my chest in the middle of the night, I duct-taped both children to their respective mattresses before heading to bed myself.

Never a dull moment, I tell ya.