Noise in the Night

Last night I went out with friends to eat and see "Pirates of the Caribbean". Toby did not go with me - as I have mentioned before, he is not big on movies. I got home about 10:30 PM and moved the puppy to my side of the bed so that I could tend to her during the night. The cat came in, but then put her back out. About 4:30 AM, Toby woke up and said, "Is that cat in the house? If it is, it is breaking glass." I thought this was a very funny statement on several levels. First, Toby gives me a very hard time if I wake him up with a similar statement. He thinks it is silly for me to wake him up when I hear a noise and expect him to go find out what it is. In fact, something has to really scare me before I bother to wake him. When we had babies, he thought I was silly when I would wake him up to say that the baby was crying. His response was usually, "If you hear the baby, you should go take care of it and not wake me too. Why should both of us be awake?" Don't worry; I did not fall for that one. If I had waited on him to hear the baby crying, our children would have been neglected. A good elbow to the midsection seems to help the hearing impaired. Which brings us to the second funny thing, Toby's hearing is just not what it use to be. To hear "glass breaking" would be pretty unusual for him due to the high pitch ping noise is not in his range. Also, he has selective hearing - he only hears and responds to things that interest him and few things interest him more than his sleep. The third funny thing about his statement is that he really must not have been very awake. Toby may fall asleep quickly, but he comes awake much more slowly. Why would the cat be in the house? Why would it be breaking glass? The noise that woke him was not a crash, but more like a ping. Why did he wake me too? We both stayed silent waiting to hear the noise again, and we did hear several more pings. "Hail!" Toby said. My thoughts exactly.