Counting to three in the night

My friend, Lisa, wrote of a sleepless night in her blog. We had one, too.

It can be terribly windy in Hout Bay. The wind blows from the South East, and luckily hits more or less one end of our house, and not the thatch roof. Otherwise we would need to get the house re-thatched quite often.

I don't like storms. Burglars take advantage of noises caused by the wind, as well as the false alarms caused by things flying about in the gardens. People assume it's nothing, and go on sleeping.

We had a strange storm last night. One minute there was a storm, and then next minute it was dead calm. Then the wind picked up again. When it was blowing, I kept waking up and waiting for an alarm to go off. We have lots of plants in the garden. Strong winds move the branches and huge leaves. The moving greenery sometimes disturb the invisible beams and cause the alarm to go off.

When the wind stopped, I woke up to the strangeness of the silence. And after a while the wind was blowing again, and I was up again.

India couldn't sleep, either. She woke up three times to have a bottle of milk, and went for a wee once. Once she woke up because of a bad dream, and a number of times for no apparent reason.

The alarm went off the first time around 1:30 AM. The security company phoned and we told them not to bother coming to our house. We expected the alarm was caused by the wind, but couldn't be sure. We were just so tired, that we went back to sleep.

After about ten minutes, Matias came and woke us up. He'd figured out what had caused the alarm: our deflated bouncy-castle-slide had been picked up by the wind and flown about 10 metres. It's a big heavy thing (too heavy for me to move). It had been plugged to the socket on the wall, but the plug had been torn away from the wall and the thing had broken.

India and I watched Matias and Heikki through the window as they went to get the 'dancing castle' (as India calls it) inside. India looked at them and said: "Look mummy, there's two!" Matias came in and India shrieked happily as she pointed at Heikki who was now alone in the garden: "Look, mummy, there's one!" Matias went back outside, followed by our Tigger-like Turbo. India was delighted, and counted Heikki, Matias and Turbo. She looked at me with a grin on her face and said: "Look, mummy! There's three!"

We went back to sleep only to be woken up by another alarm at around 3 AM. This time we think it was a rug on the washing line on the other side of the house.

India and I didn't get much sleep for the rest of the night. India kept falling asleep only to wake up crying. In the morning I saw she'd been badly eaten by mosquitoes, so no wonder she couldn't sleep properly.

Heikki and I hadn't been bitten once.