Pillow Talk

My husband is sick. So sick, in fact, that he skipped his weekly lab to go home and nap with Jake and Lucy. It's understandable. If I was taking a physics lab, I would skip it any time I got a tickle in my throat. Seriously though, he sounded so pathetic on the phone that I went by CVS after work and picked up the curer of all that ails you - the NettiPot. My parents have one and my step-dad swears by it, so I figured, what the heck.

After dinner (which I started cooking, but my husband, in his infinite culinary wisdom, took over) he mixed the saline solution and NettiPotted away. He didn't even whine all that much. I think that it did make him feel better, even if he won't admit that a bright blue mini teapot could do the tricks that Benadryl obviously can't. In my opinion, Benadryl is only useful for one thing - sleeping late. I use it as my cheap alternative to Ambien. Sue me.

We got to talking before we went to sleep, which is not like us because my pre-sleep time includes reading whatever literature of choice I have at the moment (at this time it's Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - yes, you can call me an intellectual giant) and ignoring everything else around me. He started telling me childhood stories that I haven't heard, amazingly, including one that really blew me away.

Evidently, his aunt and uncle own some house in Inman that various members of his family have lived in from time to time. Don't ask. One of his aunts said that she was staying there and sleeping on the couch in the living room and opened her eyes to see a line of ghosts walking through the house and into the kitchen. She said she closed her eyes and opened them again and the ghosts were still there. So she grabbed her Bible and held onto it and prayed and then the ghosts were gone. Chad said that he had to sleep over there and sleep on that same couch and was terrified the entire night.

I burst out laughing when he told me this, not because I didn't empathize with him, but because it was such a ludicrous thing. What was it, a ghostly version of America's Next Top Model with the ghosts strutting down an Inman house's catwalk? And who in their right mind tells a child a story like this? I have learned that you just DON'T tell kids scary stuff because a.) I was a kid and remember how things just stuck in my brain like gorilla glue and b.) they will never forget it and you will always be known as the slightly batty, weird mom/dad/aunt/uncle who told the ghost stories.

We have such romantic pillow talk, don't you think?