4am phone calls

First off I want to thank my two wonderful friends, mammagriffith and city girl for convincing me to finally open this blog! While I origionally assured them that the blog would not ever be used for anything of a personal nature, and simply to share my writing with them (and them alone!) this morning seemed ripe for a good rant.

I cannot begin to express how frustrating I find it when people call or send text messages at inappropriate times. I have a few friends who live in different time zones and for them I can forgive this mishap, they usually just forget that I'm still sleeping even if it may be close to 9 where they live. This is much harder to forgive, however, when the culprit is your own father who definitely doesn't live in a different time zone. My dad recently had surgery and, in my opinion, has been home for way too long to recover. This has caused him to forget some of the basest of social skills, one of them being that you simply don't bug people over mundane things while they are sleeping. Or perhaps he has his nights and days so mixed up he forgets the time. Until today, it has only been a few text messages and I've been hesitant to mention anything to him. Today however really takes the cake. I was awoken (from a pretty awesome dream I might add) from my phone ringing early this morning. How early I didn't yet know, I'm blind without my glasses and it was still dark. I fumble for my phone and after about the third time I manage to pick it up. I see it's my dad and I instantly start to panic. My thoughts go immediately to an aunt who has end stages MS. I'm certain she must be dead or dying. Or maybe something has happened to my mom or my brother. I answer the phone. The first thing he says is, "I'm sorry, did I wake you up? I thought you might be up by now." Okay, so it must be around 6am or so, and I'm wondering now why my husband's alarm didn't go off. I'm not really sure what I managed to mumble back. The rest of the conversation is fairly fuzzy to me, because I realized that this was not an emergency. He called because he was watching the news and saw that my town was flooding. I guess he was worried? I told him something about how I knew that all ready, I saw it on the news the night before, but we were fine. I'm sure he must be hanging up now. But no. He goes on to tell me that their power went out a little while ago for about an hour or so, and they have one inch of snow. At this point my spouse rolls over and whispers to me, "It's four thirty in the morning!" and I'm suddenly so irate I want to throw the phone. He called me at 4:30am to tell me about flooding, an small power outage and one inch of SNOW? Oh, and he's not done. He's heard the place where my husband works is flooding, too. (by the way, no it's not). I realize he's going to keep going if I don't do something about it, and I somehow manage to say goodbye and hang up the phone. By this time both myself and my husband are fully awake and will spend the rest of the night that way. The addreneline is still pumping in my veins from thinking a family member was dead or injured. The only bright spot is, after I hung up, I realized that the baby was moving around and kicking like crazy, so my other half got to feel it for the first time. It wasn't the great and wonderful moment I had always imagined however, given we were both still irritated. I've been informed that if I do not call my dad and tell him how inappropriate this was, my loving husband will do it for me. I trust myself to be more diplomatic than him, so it's probably good, but I'm all ready dreading the phone call. I don't handle confrontation well. ugh.