Forget shingles, sleep is the new small talk

There are plenty of jokes about how when people age their conversations start to revolve around their various medical ailments.

In my house it’s all about sleep.

My husband works crazy hours and we are often like two ships passing in the night. When we finally connect, often mid-day on the phone, the conversation always starts like this.

"Did you sleep ok?"
"Um hmm, um hmm"
"When did you go to bed?"
"Uh huh, uh huh"
"When did you get up?"
"Yup, yup"
"When did Graham get up?"
"Ouch, that early eh?"
"Did you wake up much?"
"Hmmm – probably was the heat/ cold/ humidity/ dryness"

Only after we are sufficiently updated on hours slept, hours in bed trying to get to sleep, hours spent listening to Graham and wishing he would go back to sleep and hours of sleep that we absolutely have to get tonight in order to fully function, do we proceed to catch up on more pressing matters in our day-to-day lives.

When the hell did this happen?

Didn’t we used to be interesting, vibrant people? I am pretty sure that if the conversation on our first date bore any similarity to the one above we would never have hooked up and produced the little treasure that is the cause of our current obsession with all things sleep.

And the scary part is Graham is actually a brilliant sleeper – he sleeps 11 hours a night, every night. He never wakes up and he even takes a nap for about two hours unless-

Oh God.

I can’t stop myself. I officially suck at sparkling conversation.

I am going to vow here and now to stop slipping sleep statistics into every conversation. I will only talk about sleep with my hubby on the days after nights when I have gotten so little sleep that I can trade on my deprivation for SERIOUS brownie points.

Starting tomorrow. I didn’t sleep well last night and I need a good eight hours before I can make a change like that.