What Keeps You Up at Night?

I love sleep. Not only do I love sleep but I will fully admit that it is also my escapism when I'm going through a difficult time. That being said, there have been a handful of times I've laid awake at night, my mind racing. For example, during times of change when I've moved to a different state, the night before I left for college, when I was about to leave my mission to return home, the end of a relationship.

There have also been health related reasons, such as when my blood sugar was too high, or too low, to go to bed. The night I was in Singapore to collect my dad from the hospital. The nights we were in Chicago after his accident, waiting to see if he'd live. And of course we all have those incredibly personal experiences good or bad that chase away sleep.

Our last night in the Dominican Republic was for none of the reasons above. Earlier in the evening when we Shannon and I were boiling and bleaching all of the shells we'd found, my mom noticed that something had taken a bite out of one of the bananas. I was baffled because I was SURE I hadn't bought them that way. Baffled, we went back to cleaning and my mom to reading. A few minutes later we hear her scream ... a large rodent had scurried underneath her bed. We couldn't figure out where it went so we hoped for the best and eventually my parents went to bed.

Shannon and I stayed up packing and watching The Great Gatsby but eventually went to bed ourselves.  However, soon we were woken-up by a crash in the kitchen. Afraid something was wrong with my parents Shannon went outside to see what was going on. There were broken dishes but no parents. We shrugged thinking that it had to have been leaning incorrectly while drying and fallen off. Not taking any chances that it was the rodent we quickly cleaned it up and went back to bed. Soon we heard scurrying in our room and I freaked out, turning on the light. It ran underneath our bed and into the bathroom. I said to myself, "okay, as long as it stays over there I can fall asleep with the light on." As I tried to will myself back to sleep we heard this repetitive scamper, swish, thud... scamper, swish, thud. I peeked over the bed to see what it was doing and was so baffled, I had to get the following on video tape:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ezk16TEJX0

*I am happy to report that after Shannon had a Parent Trap bear-in-woods-moment, I opened up the door, we hid behind the bed and as soon as it wandered out, I SLAMMED the door. A few hours sleep before one last beach comb, shower and hasta... nunca DR!