Sleepless in Florida

Last Friday, we took our niece on her first "sleep-over" vacation to Florida. She slept. I didn't.

Friday night, feeling a bit homesick, she decided she really, really needed to crawl into bed with Tim and myself. No problem. It was one of those extra large, California King-sized beds. There are mansions with less square footage than this thing. In fact, you need to send out a search party to see if anyone else is even in the bed with you. Which is why I'm still trying to figure out how one little seven year old could make it feel like I was trying to sleep on a postage stamp.

About two hours after we fell asleep, I had that dream. You know, the one where you are falling? Except it wasn't a dream. Her highness had somehow maneuvered me right to the edge of the mattress where I was precariously hanging on for dear life.

Rappelling the twelve feet down to the floor (oh, did I mention that the actual double-thick mattress is on top of a platform bed that you need a pole-vault and a good, strong tailwind to get up on?) I debated leaving her there and taking the middle position, but I was afraid she would continue to roll in that direction and I really didn't want to have to explain to her parents why their child looked like flat Stanley when I returned her.

I very gingerly leaned over and nudged her toward the middle. She hunkered down and snored louder. So much for plan A. I gently put one hand under her shoulder and one under her legs and rolled her over. She rolled right back. And took my pillow. There went plan B. On to plan C: I outweighed her by about six tons, and was going to have to use that to my advantage.

Clambering up onto the one-inch mattress border that she had so generously left for me, all the while wishing I had taken mountain climbing in PE instead of pistol, I simultaneously rolled her and slid in and over as far as I could. Victory! I could now lay claim to a full six inches of mattress real estate. I was ecstatic.

The only downside was that I had to stay on my back and brace myself against the bed frame so that she couldn't reclaim her space. Oh yeah. That was comfortable. Suddenly, the webbed lounge chairs out at the pool were beginning to look like a little bit of heaven.

By some miracle though, I was finally able to fall asleep again only to be woken up an hour or so later by a bad dream--hers. Yep. Nothing gets your heart pounding faster than being pulled out of a sound sleep by someone yelling in your ear, "I didn't do it!" while thrashing around like a really big, really annoyed fish in a very small net. If they ever need a back-up for the paddles on the crash cart at the local ER, I've got just the thing.

After we soothed her and got our heart rates down to two hundred beats per minute, I settled down again to find I had lost half of the space I had fought so valiantly for. Oh well. Sheer exhaustion allowed me to drift off to sleep (you have to pick your battles, I guess), but like clockwork, I awoke from yet a third dream (this one was mine. Score: me=2, my niece=1). In this one, I was Gretel and the witch had successfully coaxed me into climbing in the oven to check if it was on.

I awoke to find a fifty pound plus human heating pad pressed up against my back. Goody. Just what I needed. Something to ward off the cold, Florida night. Oh, and I was once again reduced to hanging off the edge of "our" side.

Resolving myself to the situation up top, I picked myself up out of the puddle of sweat I was lying in and slid down to give the bottom of the bed a try. I might have to deal with feet in my face, but the ceiling fan was positioned directly above the bottom of the bed, so the trade-off was worth it. Or so I thought.

Turns out those ceiling fans actually work. Who knew? Now, instead of roasting to death, I was freezing to death, and guess who was rolled up in the sheet, snug as a bug in a rug?

I decided I wasn't meant to sleep. Oh well, there was always Saturday night. Except that her loose tooth fell out and she was so excited by the prospect of the tooth fairy visiting that she didn't want to go to sleep on Saturday.

Somehow, Tim managed to sucker me into tooth fairy duty by claiming he had nothing smaller than a twenty. If I had known that would be the price of just one nights sleep, I would have let him wear the dress and wings and added another twenty of my own (actually, if there really had been a dress and wings, I would have been willing to chip in two twenties.).

10 pm rolled around, but there was no sign of the sandman. 11 pm came and went. Not one grain of sand in our lovely little niece's eyes, but the sandman sure had knocked Tim over the head with one of his larger bags. At this point, I was considering either spiking a Shirley Temple with Valium for our niece, or a large coffee with No-Doze for me.

By 11:30, she no longer seemed quite so lovely, and I was contemplating just handing her a fifty and telling her to put the tooth under her pillow when she got home and the fairy would match it.

Finally, when I checked somewhere near midnight, her head was down. Moving with a stealth that would put 007 to shame, I crept over to where she lay sleeping, reaching ever so cautiously for her pillow and...her head popped up like a jack-in-the-box.

"What're you doing?" she demanded suspiciously.

"Er. Um. Jut checking to make sure you put the tooth under your pillow. Wouldn't want the tooth fairy to have to pass by. And speaking of the tooth fairy, you know she won't come as long as you are awake." Smooth. Nice save. I patted myself on the back as I crept away.

At 12:30, I slipped back again, sure that she just had to be asleep. Personally, at that point, I could have slept hanging on the side of the bed. Heck, I could have slept dangling on a single thread, suspended over shark infested waters.

Once more, I reached for her pillow, and, just as my hand closed around the tooth...her eyes popped open. "What're you doing?" she demanded again.

Uh oh. I had used up my one and only excuse and my sleep deprived brain wasn't coming up with anything else.

"Er. Um. Uh. Hmm. Something, something, just checking," I mumbled desperately. "Gotta go."

Propping my eyelids open and swearing to myself that the next time, Time was so wearing the dress and wings, I didn't care what it cost, I waited another half hour.

This time, I whispered her name first. Then, I bumped the bed. Finally, I jiggled her pillow. She was, at last, asleep. Fighting not to collapse in a heap next to her, tooth in hand, I made the exchange and stumbled off to catch a few winks myself.

The next morning, she was up and at 'em, calling her parents to tell them that the tooth fairy had found her even in Florida. "But," I overheard her say, "it was the strangest thing. Annie was just obsessed with my pillow!"