Yawwwwwwwwnnnnnnn.

Now, I'm not going to name any names. Husbands with reputations to protect and manliness to uphold could be embarrassesd. So let's just say that in some house in New England, the wife started out by being stupid enough to stay up until 1:00 in the morning because she had agreed to fold a bucket of laundry and forgot until midnight and hates saying she'll do something and then not doing it. So she was up too late before any of this ever happened.

Then she went to bed, and her husband was still awake, himself, having just finished some schoolwork. There was a brief moment of hilarity, and if I was less brain-dead now I might be able to come up with the topic. Something about those alarm clocks that roll out of reach after you hit snooze, and somehow combining that with those vacuum cleaning robots that drive themselves around the house... I don't know. But go ahead and giggle anyway, it was funny at the time.

Somehow, from there, the conversation morphed to Bigger Things, much of which has been brewing for a while, all in the general vein of wanting certain things changed but not wanting to have to ask and worrying that asking one too many things might just send me, er, I mean, the wife, over the edge because she's already so overloaded and overwhelmed and pathetic and so then who is responsible for whose emotions and so on and so forth... complicated and lengthy and confusing as only non-angry but fundamental marital conversations can be. Until 3:00 in the morning.

Yawwwwwwwwnnnnnnn.

The up-side is, things were said that needed to be said. Without arguing or crying or accusations.

And the bigger up-side is that even though the wife overslept this morning and wasn't out of bed until 7:30, she still made it to work by 8:00... or close enough for government work, anyway.

And the biggest up-side is that as the wife was heading into the shower, she noticed that their son, who has been sleeping until 9:00 or later recently, was standing up and chatting with himself at 7:30 in the morning, so the wife headed off to work secure in the knowledge that no one else over the age of 7 was getting any more sleep than she did.