I want you to picture something in your mind.  Work with me here.

Imagine that you’re utterly exhausted, fall into bed, glance at the clock and see that it reads 1:34am.  Imagine the deep sigh that escapes when you calculate the difference in the time you need to get up and the time that it is then and realize that it’s only 5 hours.  Picture in your mind the pep talk that you give yourself briefly telling yourself that you can sleep when you’re dead, it’s only temporary, and the little prayer that goes up asking for all the help in the world to hear the alarm in the morning so as to not oversleep.

Now, once you turn off the light and roll over, you realize that there is another body in your supposed to be empty bed.  You grumble briefly before you realize that you granted permission for her to be there because she, too, was trying to get up on time by hearing an alarm and wanted to sleep in your bed.  You see her sweet face, wondering what she’s dreaming about as you briefly glance down to see if her tummy is rising and falling – a sure sign that she’s still alive – just like you did nine years prior when you brought her home from the hospital.

You smile even though she’s taking up more than her half of the bed and then wonder how someone so tiny could consume so much of the bed.  You then manuever yourself so that you aren’t bothering her or the dog that has now joined you and question when your bed became so small.

Just as you are about to drift off, grateful for the blessings that surround you, you hear the cat scratching at the side of the dresser.  You try to drown the noise out but she doesn’t stop.  You’re not worried about the furniture as it’s older than you and really should be replaced, rather the fact that you now have 4 hours and 45 minutes of sleep and every minute that you’re awake hinders the pleasant attitude and functioning brain that you wish to possess when you awake.  After determining that you will, indeed, purchase new bedroom furniture… someday, you yell at the cat in your loudest whisper to cut it out adn then wonder why you attempt to be quiet when you know that mass that lies next to you would sleep through a nueclear explosion – and then chuckle because she definately got that from you.

The cat settles down, your youngest moves over just a tad allowing you a little more room, and the dog decides that the couch would be more comfortable so you stretch out a bit, pull the covers up to your chin, close your eyes and you’re out before you can utter just one more prayer seeking ears to hear Him…and your alarm.

Suddenly, you awake, startled because the dog is barking uncontrollably.  You, again in a loud whisper, tell the dog to stop it shortly before you look over to check on your sleeping beauty.  Surprised that she is awake, you say “it’s not time to get up yet, we have another hour” before you roll back over and pray that the dog will SHUT UP.  Your daughter gets up, peeks out the bedroom window and then calls for the dog to follow her to the back door.  She returns to the room, crawls in the bed, tells you that the dog was barking at the cats outside and curls up with you.

Looking forward to that last hour of sleep before you start the day, you faintly hear the dog barking outside and pray that the neighbors are already up before you hear a squeaking noise.  Your daughter, now awake, decides she wants to start a conversation with you that requires thought.  You shush her and listen.

Your daughter leaves the room announcing that she’s going to go look for the cat to make sure that she’s not out side with the mean cats. The squeaking noise is still there.  It’s one that you’ve heard before, but you’re just not sure where it’s coming from.  Your daughter now stands in the doorway to the bedroom and after silencing your daughter once more, you focus hard on listening to determine where the noise is coming from.  Immediately after your chatty cathy stops talking for more than 5 seconds you realize that the noise is coming from behind your dresser — the dresser adjacent to your bed.

You panic.  You think you can identify the sound with one that you’ve heard before.  Still half asleep, you rack your brain attempting to place that sound with the match that has been filed away in the depths of your brain — the same brain that isn’t firing all synapses and remains asleep.

A wave of panic sets in when the jukebox of sounds etched in your brain flips to what you believe to be behind your dresser — and you’re praying hard that it isn’t what you believe it to be… which is …

MICE!

The sudden change in temperatures, the back door left open the day before, and living in a wooded area are all reasons why mice would be in the house and they encircle your mind as you try to figure out what you’re going to do with mice in the house.  At 5:32 in the morning, there are very few people to come to the aid of a 32 year old woman afraid of something so small, but it’s not a problem that can be left alone either — you’ve learned that one from experience.

You ask your daughter if she found the cat and when she responds with no, a look of concern appears on her face.  Worried that her precious cat is outside with the nasty cats, she turns to peek out the window again and when she murmers, “I wonder where she could be,” the synapses begin firing, going off like a fireworks display on the Fourth of July.

You wonder… could that be what’s behind the dresser?  No.  It can’t be.  We’ve got a month or two more before we have to worry about that.  It’s too soon.

The noise, the squeaking is still there, escalating louder and louder until it stops.  After a pause, and if you (and your chatter box) remian completely still and silent, you can hear a different, softer noise — barely audible.  Then, the squeaking that continues to escalate until the quiet noise starts again.

The panic from the thought of mice behind your dresser is nothing compared to the terror that just washed over you when you realized that your prayers that it wasn’t mice behind the dresser had been answered.

You swallow hard.  You pray that you’re wrong – “I know I wanted to be wrong last time, Lord with the mice, but Dear God, PLEASE let me be wrong about this.  PLEASE.”

You daughter comes to sit next to you on the bed; she knows that something is wrong based on the expression that now covers your face.  “Mom, what is it?  What’s wrong?”

She nudges you but you don’t acknowledge her.  You realize that you’ve entered sheer panic mode.  Your mind starts racing about your options to deal with what hides behind the dresser and you come up with two — ignoring it and praying that it will go away and facing it head on.  You realize that ignoring it, not investigating, not checking could lead to a bigger catastophe but you know that you can’t face it head on – at least not on four hours of sleep, no coffee, and limited knowledge of what’s going on.

You decide to do what every mother does when placed in a situation like this and decide that you will handle it much like you did the mouse situation last winter… you enlist your daughter, the daughter that isn’t afraid of anything, the daughter that follows the motto “the grosser, more disguting, most unique, the better.”

You turn to her, she takes her hand off your shoulder and her eyes tell you that she wants to know what’s going on in your head; that she needs to know if she should be worried too.  You open your mouth to speak, but you pause.  A clear mind would tell you that she will tackle this, head on, like you should be doing; that she will be thrilled, overjoyed, and leap into action, taking charge of the situation.  But your half asleep brain worries that she will also freak out and in turn, placing the solution and the dealing with back on you.

Realizing again after hearing the squeaking sounds rise again from what lies behind the dresser that ignoring the situation could cause ever greater issues, you open your mouth again and say to your daughter, “I think,” you say, pausing again, “if you look behind the dresser you’ll find the squeaking noises.”

Her eyes get wide, her mouth gapes open as she realizes that there’s something behind that dresser that you’re not all too keen about.  At that moment in time, she doesn’t care what it is but knowing that you are terrified excites her.  She slowly turns her head toward the dresser and moments later starts to shift her body.  When she starts to move in the direction of the dresser and realizes there’s little light, she reaches over and flips on the bedside lamp for greater vision.

She creeps back across the bed, stopping every few seconds to glance back at you, watching your face in an attempt to catch your full reaction.  Her trip across the bed, while only a short distance seemed to take forever.  You wait, breath held for her to tell you of the discovery that she’s made, prayerful that your hunch is wrong, but knowing that it was dead on.  As she peers down behind the dresser, you flop you head back down on the pillow and quickly pull the covers up over your head as you hear her emit a gasp of sheer delight.

She bounces back across the bed much faster this time, similar to the way she does Christmas morning or the mornings she enters your room to tell you that the tooth fairy had stopped by during the night.  She slowly pulls the covers off of your face, leans in so that her nose is touching your ear and whispers…

“Congratulations!  You’re a grandma!”

You groan, pull the covers back over your head, and withstand the shaking of the bed as she, once again, bounds across it to peek again behind the dresser.  Your suspicions were right.  Your daughter is oohing and aahing and while part of you feels that you should go and assess the situation, you know tht your daughter has it covered for the time being.

“How many?” you ask, not sure you want to know the answer.

“It’s too dark,” she replies as she makes her way to the light switch, causing my eyes to shut before opening them again to adjust to the light.

She resumes her position on the edge of the bed, her face as far behind the dresser as it would go. “Looks like just one,” she said.

An hour later, after texting your boyfriend, calling him and leaving frantic messages and wondering why he wasn’t up at this unGodly hour of the morning, and after Googling search phrase after search phrase in an effort to figure out if everything was okay, you finally decide that you should see what’s behind the dresser.

You slowly enter your room, seeing your daughter, now dressed for school again with her head stuck behind the dresser.  She’s fiddling with something and while you know that she won’t want to tear herself away, you tell her that it’s time to leave for the bus.

She looks at you, sad, but starts to get up.  “It’s okay, Mom,” she says, comforting you with her eyes and voice, knowing that you want to look but you’re scared.  “You can look.  It’s okay.”

She kneels behind you on the bed and you slowly look back behind that dresser, the dresser that you determined just hours earlier that you were going to replace and find this…

“Congratulations, Grandma,” she says again with a huge smile as she leaps off the bed, grabs her bookbag and heads toward the door.

***

Allow me to introduce to you A, B, and C.  A would be on the left and those black spots when looking at it from the top, look like an angel.  It has the most white.  B is the one in the middle and has less white than A.  C is the on the right, the one that we believe is all black, but we’ve not yet confirmed that.

A, B, and C were born sometime between 1:34am and 5:28am, although Samara swears there was just one when she first looked and after sitting with me while I was googling, “what the hell do I do with a cat who just gave birth?” and “is one kitten in a litter possible?” she told me that she saw Casey in the birthing position based on the pictures and saw at least one of them come out.  Who knows?

So, we’ll go with A,B, and C were born at 5ish AM on March 25, 2009.  Momma and babies are fine.  I know more about cats now than I ever needed to know, but my biggest lesson in this, short of not taking the previous owners word that the cat was fix is that when you have a Vet Tech in the family circle, it would be wiser to ask her about the gestation period of a cat rather than rely on the time frame given to you by a service mechanic, even if he is incredibly gorgeous.  For the record my dear boy, the gestation period of the cat is 9-10 weeks and not 4 months as you told me about, oh, i don’t know… 9-10 weeks ago!

But I don’t blame you.  I could’ve Googled it then, too, and didn’t.

But I have to tell you, you set me at ease when you finally woke up and called me and I recounted this story to you and said to me, “Hey!  At least this will make a great story to blog about!”  Yes.  Sleeping through the delivery of kittens when the birthing nest is right next to your head, allowing your daughter to handle everything as you shout questions to her from your research online and refusing to even look behind the dresser is definitely something that should be deemed blog worthy.  Yes, it ranked about my long overdue update on my spiritual experience with the teens at Battlecry and the news I wanted to share about how I found a new job on Twitter.  Those will just have to wait.

But not now.  I have to go to bed.  It’s late and I have to be up in 4.5 hours.

But I can sleep when I’m dead, right?

Until next time…