Snoring- Flying children! Oh my!

My family has a snoring problem. My mom was the worst. She talked in her sleep and had one of those snores that started out really quiet (heavy breathing) and ended with a house rumbling chainsaw sound. This took around 7 or 8 snores to round up there, but man once it did you spent the rest of the night with the pillow over your head and woke in the morning to her telling you if you didn’t sleep so funny you wouldn’t have a cric in your neck!  I always wondered why as a kid I woke up every morning wrapped in my blankets like a mummy, head at the footboard, or hanging sideways off my bed. I now know it was because every time my mother snored (from across the house) It made me toss and turn. I’m not nearly as violent in my sleep now.

My favorite story about my mom’s snoring happened when we went on our annual trip to Atlanta, Georgia to go shopping. We went on this trip with my Aunt (my godmother and my Mom’s best friend) and two of her sons. We loved this trip. It meant that we got to stay at the Peachtree Plaza Hotel and watch Cable and jump on the beds and generally get into a ton of trouble (This is where I lay blame on the boys- as little girls we were quiet and demure)<--ok I am so leaving this in there because I snorted when I wrote it…if someone ever called me demure I think I’d have to punch them.

This particular time somehow our room only had one queen bed, a pullout couch and a table with two huge plush chairs. Annie was small enough that she just pushed the two plush chairs together and slept. My Mom and my Aunt Mary shared the bed. Colin, Chandler and I were the older kids, albeit small enough that all three of us fit on the pullout couch. We were about the age that we all thought it was funny when someone farted (I never outgrew that) and naturally like most kids when its time to go to bed we wanted none of it. It all starts with the games where you see if someone can jump on the bed without waking a parent or someone tries to run out of the room and back without getting caught or someone throws something at Annie across the room or sneaks up and farts on her in the dark...(see what I mean, I was not nice to my little sister) Then we get yelled at and we try to sleep.

It was even  harder  to sleep in the same room with my Mom when she was snoring. While Annie and I knew we were in trouble, the boys didn’t.  So, once we had settled down, the snoring began, quiet at first ( I knew it was coming and put the pillow over my head) getting louder and louder with each breath. ( I still don’t know how Aunt Mary slept through it) Colin slaps his hands on the bed and says, “oh my god your Mom is snoring SO loud.” Naturally we all start giggling because its getting worse. He gets more ticked off because she now sounds like we've walked into a construction site in the same room.  (as an aside, at the time I think Colin was playing baseball and had a pretty good throw) Colin tries a couple of times in vain at calling, “shut up, shuuut uuuuppp” to no avail so he takes a spare pillow off the floor and launches it in the direction of the parents bed. We all cringe when we hear it hit, but are laughing so what happened next naturally made it worse. The pillow hit my mother square in the face and she sits up in the bed, points out in front of her and says, “I think……… there are children flying in here” We lost it. We even have Annie awake and laughing now.  My Aunt finally wakes up and says,”you guys leave Jane alone she’s trying to sleep.” Chandler replies,”she’s snoring so loud we CAN’T sleep!”  Aunt Mary tells him if we would all just settle down and go to sleep we wouldn’t hear her.  Yea right.

So, we try, we really do. We all settle down, she’s back to her heavy breathing and we’re trying in vain to fall asleep.        

 Here we go again….louder and louder until Colin starts getting irritated again and throws another pillow at her. I give him credit for good aim because he was on the far side of the bed and she was on the other end of the room, but he’s able to hit her in the face again. This time she sits up and says,” you need to come down now.” To which we again die laughing.

At this point I think Colin had chastised her enough that she either quieted down, or we all were so exhausted from laughing that we finally went to sleep, but this is one of my favorite stories of all time. I miss my Mom every day, but will always remember our awesome trips to Atlanta.

signing off~ Mandy