Both our kids are prone to talk in their sleep, especially when they are too hot (eg, Ash likes to randomly wear flanelette pyjamas on warm nights ). Not just barely coherent mumblings, but full on random sentences. If you’ve seen the scene in Finding Nemo where Dory is talking in her sleep (”Sea monkey stole my money”) and found that funny, that’s the kind of disjointed thing we’re talking about. I should keep a log of these, cos I can’t think of any of the best ones right now. Connor’s first one was waking up upset, when I tried to find out what was wrong he said “I don’t want a black fish”. It’s ok mate, you don’t have to.

The other night we were just turning off the TV and heading for bed when Mon froze and said ‘That’s one of the kids’. We headed down the hall, I got to Ash’s room first. Mon came down the hallway and I stuck my hand up in a stop signal way. Three seconds later I realised : I was deliberately waiting for Ash to say something weird and I didn’t want Monique to interrupt. It’s true, our somnolent mind throws up the most amazing pieces of surrealism that I actually, selfishly wanted to hear that more than let Monique interrupt her.

I’m a little vindicated, or at least not alone in my guilt though. I walked out of the room half laughing and said “I am a bad and terrible person” and Monique laughed, knew exactly what I’d been thinking and said “Do you want me to go and see what she was gonna say?”