C.H. Armstrong Books

So “the girl” is home from college.  This is the moment I’ve been waiting for!  She’s been gone for nine long months and has barely visited except when the dorms kicked her out for an extended vacation like Christmas and Spring Break.  Oh boy have I missed her!

Ya know how sometimes absence makes the heart grow fonder?  Yeah…I’m experiencing it.  I’d forgotten how much noise Amber makes.  From them moment she drives into the garage, I can hear her belting out whatever song she’s listening to at the top of her lungs.  The shower starts at odd times of the day and night, and I hear Netflix playing through her door at three and four in the morning.

The truth is, I love to complain but I do miss all of these things.  Even the velociraptor scream she perfected her junior year of high school and pulls out just for my benefit because she knows it drives me nuts.  I miss every bit of it and I’m absorbing it all because I know she’ll be gone again soon.

With all that said, there is one thing I didn’t miss:  being awakened from a dead sleep by one of her “emergencies.”  I’d actually forgotten they existed.

This morning at 1:50 as I was enjoying a really great dream about the King of Men, Jamie Fraser, from Diana Gabaldon’s epic Outlander series (yeah…it was steamy!) my daughter runs into the bedroom and frantically wakes me.

“Mom!  Mom!  Come quick!  Please!  Hurry!  You have to come now!”  Her voice is frantic and I fall out of bed expecting to find blood and guts.

I race to Amber’s bedroom to find everything in order.

“What in the world?  What’s wrong?”  My heart is racing and won’t slow down.

“A spider!  Ya gotta kill it!  Please!”

“Are you FREAKIN’ KIDDING ME?”  The only reason I didn’t yell is because I’d wake the rest of the house.

“Mommy, please!  It’s on my bed!  Please kill it,” she cried.

I turned to go back to bed, but she grabbed ahold of my arm and nearly wrenched it from the socket.  “PLEASE MOMMY!”

Knowing I won’t get any sleep until the spider is dead, I have her point it out to me and quickly dispatch the little creature to the great spiderweb in the sky.  Finally, I can go back to bed.

I return to my room and crawl under the covers only to hear the vacuum cleaner running.  She’s now vacuuming her entire bed and room at 2:00 in the morning!  I put a pillow over my head and finally drift off to sleep.

At 2:30 in the morning, she wakes me up again.

“Mommy?  Are you sure you killed it?  I’ve vacuumed my whole room and I can’t find it!  Maybe it’s crawling around still in my bedroom somewhere.”

The only conscious thought I had before my evil glare sent her racing behind her own locked door was that if that spider isn’t dead, she’s gonna be if she wakes me up again!

If she’s really the daddy’s girl she claims to be, why does she only call me when she has an “emergency”???