PREMIUM DELUXE DADDY HEARING

[Karan]:  NOTE TO SELF: If you ever come back in the next life, be sure to order yourself the Premium Deluxe version of Daddy Hearing, which will enable you to sleep through almost everything, but particularly your young son having a restless night.  Premium Deluxe Daddy Hearing will almost always result in someone else getting up to tend to the infant, so that you may ping open your eyelids and scratch yourself in the morning, whilst feeling fresh as a daisy.

How do men do this?  I say men but only sleep with the one, but my friends all have the same experience with Daddy Hearing; which is how I feel qualified to use the term men, plural.  It's so bloody infuriating and exhausting.

On a primal level I can understand how hunter-gatherer man needed his sleep to go and kill a brace of wild boar for dinner, whilst stay-at-home woman could sleep when the baby did during the day (HAH! - this never happens by the way).  So if we assume all of that to be true (thousands of years later!), can someone please explain to me how Himself can sleep soundly through James' restless night, but will spring out of bed like a scalded cat should someone dare walk past the house and give the car a - silent - sideways glance?  What does this say to you?

All joking aside, Ian has actually slept through an earthquake.  Obviously we live in England so our experience of an earthquake is very different to those in parts of America or Japan etc, but they're still worth waking up for don't you think?  I'm not talking about tremors; even I'd sleep through one of those, I'm talking about the one a little while ago originating from Lincolnshire that shook the whole house.  And Himself slept on, thinking I was winding him up when I woke him especially.

Ian's defence for all of this is that he's tired, a point I don't dispute; but it sort of implies that I'm not.  So perhaps it's just a Mummy Thing, perhaps I'm just programmed to hear the baby so that Himself can go a hunting and a gathering at Wickes and Machine Mart.  Perhaps it's just another in the long, long list of Mummy-Only priviliges; like taking the direct hit when the little darlings vomit so as to protect the carpet, which you know you're only going to have to clean if you don't!  Having another shower, or showers, is always preferable at stupid O'clock.  Oh the joys.

This picture is not of Ian (or James) by the way and whilst tempted as I may be; if this rather lovely specimen of hunter-gatherer sleeps through crying babies too, there seems little point in me upgrading.