My family and I (genetically speaking) have a tendency to sleep through just about anything.
In some ways, this is quite nice for me; I manage to sleep through the baby waking up without difficulty.
Sometimes it’s purely bizarre; a number of years ago my mom was living next to Clancy’s. Her bedroom window faced the gas station.
Overnight the gas station became engulfed in flames. Despite fire truck lights, the glow from the fire and presumably quite a bit of noise related to the place burning down, she slept through all of it.
My wife has joked that if the house ever caught fire, she’d have to drag me out asleep because she wouldn’t be able to wake me up.
Those who read this column regularly will know that my house is kind of old. We’ve made some significant improvements this year (with some substantial help) such as renovating the bathroom, renovating the kitchen, reinsulating the bottom of the house and replacing a sliding glass door.
Between my wife being home with the baby and the improvements to the overall heat retention, the house has managed to stay a lot warmer.
This week I woke up one morning to my alarm and my wife was missing. She hates getting out of bed and isn’t really a morning person so this came as a bit of a shocker.
She soon came back into the room, handed me the baby and told me she was going to get more wood.
Now the wood fire often doesn’t last overnight unless one of us goes to bed quite late and one of us gets up quite early.
However, despite the fire not always lasting overnight, it’s usually quite warm in the morning. This particular morning it was -25 C; meaning that even if nothing else, it would be colder.
The temperature change had done one better and popped the not perfectly closing front door open overnight; despite the freezing temperatures in the house I had remained fast asleep. Luckily the baby has quite a thick sleep sack so he was fine and one of the bathrooms had the door closed with a little heater on inside so that still worked. The other bathroom was solidly frozen.
Having to leave for work I didn’t stick around for very long. Normally, I like the cold but I can tell you it wasn’t very much fun putting on boots that were frozen to the floor.