Cadillacs Hold Heat Pretty Well

Sleep problems in my house are as abundant as pine nuggets in my flower bed.

The first thing I usually ask my hubby each morning is "How'd you sleep?" His answers range from "The dogs' barking kept me awake all night" (which I don't understand because we sleep with a fan running and our door closed) or "I was cold/too hot" or "I woke up at 4:30a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep" and so on. Then there's me. I never get a full night's sleep and often am sure I've been awake half the night. So, given this, there was no way the following situation should have EVER happened at our house.

One Saturday morning at 6:00 a.m., Hubby jolted me awake when he leapt out of bed and ran to the living room saying, "I heard the doorbell!"

What the heck????

When he didn't come right back, I got out of bed and went to the front door. There stood our bleary-eyed teenage son, shivering. He had gone to his girlfriend's house Friday night and came home at midnight. Unfortunately, he said he was locked out of the house so he slept in his car.

What! Are you kidding????

We never lock our doors, so whatever possessed me to lock them before going to bed that night is beyond me. I didn't remember locking the doors - but that's not unusual - my short-term memory is nonexistent.

"Why didn't you ring the doorbell?" Hubby and I asked together.

"I did," our son answered. "I rang the bell for 5 minutes. Then I tried to break-in through the front windows, but they were locked, so I knocked on the windows for a few minutes. When you still didn't answer, I drove to the supermarket and called mom's cell phone from a payphone." (Our son had lost his cell phone and his replacement hadn't arrived in the mail yet. The grocery store is 3 miles from our house and they close at 11:30p.m.)

My husband looked at me questioningly.

"My cell phone is out in my truck," I said sheepishly. I had forgotten to take it into the house after running some errands on Friday.

"I ran out of change and the store was closed," our son continued, "so I came back home here and slept in my car."

"We never heard you," I said, feeling a tad guilty. "Were the dogs barking? Usually the dogs bark at everything and wake dad up."

"Yeah, they were barking," our son said emphatically. "They barked the whole time. They were going crazy for about a half hour."

I gave my husband an accusing look for not waking up. The barking dogs always wake him up. Or so he says.

So, as our poor, shivering son marched off to bed thanking God his ancient Cadillac is well-insulated because it holds heat for a long time, hubby and I played the blame game; it was my fault that our son would probably catch pneumonia because I locked the doors and it was his fault because he didn't hear the barking dogs.

The one thing we did agree on - we need to have house keys made.