The No Sleep Trading of Important Items

Disclaimer: This post is being written by an 8 month pregnant woman who’s had hardly any sleep.
*edit* Just to show you the depths of my delirium, this disclaimer originally said “8 month old pregnant woman”. Yeah, that’s delirious.
End disclaimer.

Today is not going to be a great day. Today, my family and I are supposed to attend something called a “Hail and Farewell”. The hail and farewell, the most common social function in the military, is a time to welcome new officers and their spouses to the unit and say goodbye to those departing. My husband has been to many of these events, mainly for others, but plenty for himself when leaving one unit and going to the next. The farewell part is usually like a roast, in which they crack jokes, present the departing soldier with some token of appreciation, etc. Today, however, we’re all invited to attend, as the ‘hail’ will be not only for him, but for us, mainly because this is a new duty station for us and they don’t know us yet. This normally wouldn’t be a problem in the least. Except for the fact that I didn’t get to bed much before 3am and was on and off up last night, finally rising at 8:30am. I have paper thin patience this morning and feel like a walking train wreck. But at 4pm I’m supposed to be uber-smiling Stepford Army wife and mom and have the patience of a saint. I think I’m in a world of you-know-what.

As for my lack of sleep, a mere flicker of the lights twice in our house caused our A/C to shut something down and merely blow as a fan and not an A/C unit, and we had no idea. No idea, however, until we realized the sweat dripping that it was over 80 degrees when we checked the thermostat. After midnight. At a time when I’m normally comatose, it hadn’t even occurred to me what time it was or why I wasn’t already asleep, just that I was horribly uncomfortable, but nearing the end of my pregnancy, who isn’t? So after a call to post housing, and a middle-of-the-night visit by a technician, it was about 4 or 5am that we started to feel relief. By that point, though, a good night’s sleep was out of the question. Because of the heat I’d already resorted to sleeping downstairs where it’s naturally cooler. But the worst part of all? The funniest part, seal-the-deal, nail-in-the-coffin, end-all-be-all, cherry-on-top part that ensured I had no sleep? The emergency technician that responded to our A/C call left his cell phone here. A cell phone that had a horrible country song, set loudly to ring whenever it rang and/or had a message. And with us having his phone, and housing only having that # for him, until he realized it was gone, there was no getting it back to him amd getting rid of that horrible song. Oh, and it was set on ‘lock’ so no adjusting the volume, nothing. It was about 7am or so that I rolled my pregnant butt into the kitchen, took a kitchen towel and my husband’s ACU top and choked muffled it so that I could attempt to get some semblance of sleep. Until about an hour later when the home phone started to ring, and the door started knocking, as he had realized where he must’ve left it and was now looking for it.

The not-so-funniest part about it? The technician, in jotting his notes down on the work order in our kitchen, mistakenly took my husbands training manual for his new job while using it to write on. The one he was supposed to bring with him right now to the office and can’t because it’s no where to be found.

It’s just too bad I didn’t get the phone number off of that cell phone before returning it.