13. Sleep With Me
The title of this post is really not as salacious as it seems. Sorry for the clickbait, but I’ve been calling all my posts the title of a podcast.
I don’t have a problem falling asleep, at all. Falling asleep instantly is my superpower. If you asked me to fall asleep right now I could easily do it.
When I worked the 4 am shift at the airport I used to catch naps in planes and in the luggage room with suitcases as a pillow. I may have actually slept on your checked bags.
Our son and daughter, on the other hand, are another story.
Last night I was driving them both to get them to fall asleep. Even though Clara is 5, we still do that. We’ve tried everything. Numerous bedtime stories, YouTube sleep videos, threats, promises, bribes, screams, tears, you name it. I’m hoping this new Netflix series will be a miracle cure. But so far driving to get her to sleep is still the most consistently effective.
Except it wasn’t working last night. I was exhausted and struggling to stay awake while Clara was singing nursery rhymes to her 2-year-old brother Xavier at the top of her lungs, effectively keeping them both up.
I thought I might run out of gas before they were asleep when I remembered I had the Sleep With Me podcast downloaded on my phone.
I saw this podcast in the iTunes Top 100, and thought it would be useful for such an occasion as this.
Sleep With Me is “like a bedtime story for grownups.” It features a sleepy, gravely-voice guy droning on and on about… I’m not sure what. In the edition I listened to he talked about a board room meeting and an episode of Breaking Bad.
Mostly it sounded like monotonous stream of consciousness. The stories are just interesting enough that you try to follow them so it stops your busy mind from thinking about other things, but boring and meandering enough that you eventually want to just go to sleep. It goes on like this for nearly an hour and a half.
When Clara asked what I way playing, I explained this was to help her fall asleep.
“I HATE THIS AND I WON’T FALL ASLEEP,” came her reply.
Three minutes later, she was deep asleep.
It worked so well that her brother’s continued crying the rest of the way home didn’t even wake her up.
