A Surprisingly Sane Blog

I’ve officially become an old fart, but last night’s insomnia made it clear that my octogenarian ways are for the better.

James and I determined a few weeks ago that we need more discipline in our lives.  We have a tendency to stay up until comical hours of the night and wake up much too late… but neither of us ever get enough sleep.  That worked great in college, but has proved to be an unhealthy choice as parents.  Especially since (I know slap my hand with a ruler) we incorporated our kids into our nocturnal lifestyle as well.

We started with modifying the kids’ routine and have been putting them to bed at what we feel is an early bedtime.  Okay, so 8:00-8:30 may seem late to you, but that’s a small miracle in comparison to the midnight bedtime ritual they were on (*hanging head in embarrassment*).  That did wonders for both of our girls, and they weren’t waking up ridiculously early, either.  Both sleep better at night, probably because they’re not over-exhausted.  Imagine that.

But that didn’t solve the problem of our own adolescent you-can’t-make-me-go-to-bed issues.

As you have most likely already figured out, I’m a shitty sleeper.  I have insomnia most nights of the week, and I wake up feeling like a dead person most days.  If I were smart, I’d have figured out long ago that going to bed at 2:00 a.m. probably contributed to my inability to fall asleep.  But I plead stupidity in the sleep department.

However, since I returned home from Oklahoma about a week ago, we have been trying something very different.  We’ve been going to bed by about 10:00 p.m. and have been getting up “early”… which for us is somewhere in the 7:00 hour.

In addition, we’ve been picking up our endless clutter every single night so that we wake up to a clean house.

And you know what?

It’s been really working for us.  Incredibly well, in fact.  Going to bed early, waking up at a decent time, and keeping our household under control has pretty much cured my insomnia.  Sure, some nights it still takes me an hour to fall asleep, but that’s a remarkable improvement from the four-hour wait for snooze-land that I was suffering before.

We kept up our old fart routine for a week.  But then, there was last night.

We went to bed a little too late, kept each other up for an extra hour (*cough*), and my restlessness and sleep problems returned like crappy magic.

However, although it was insanely tempting to let James get up with the kids while I caught up on my zzzzz’s, I decided my time would be better spent getting up at a healthy hour and resuming my early bedtime tonight.

I’m trying to be a somewhat mature adult.  This is a big step for us.  I haven’t had this sort of discipline since I was teaching a year ago.

Send positive sleep vibes my way… and I’ll keep you posted on how this routine works for me.

Current Mood: Cool

I’m nocturnal.  It’s the only explanation.

Last night I was lying there tossing and turning until 4-something and managed to fall asleep right about the same time the sun decided to cast its annoying brightness upon the city.

Maybe I should just sleep with my lamp on.

By the way… this is like day 4 that I’ve barely slept.  Prepare for the complete meltdown that is bound to happen at any moment.

I am not one of those people who can function off of a few hours of sleep a night.

Current Mood: Angry

I haven’t really slept at all for at least a week now, and it’s becoming a pretty desperate situation for me.

Nothing is doing the trick, and believe me, I’ve tried all of ‘em.

The second I lay down and turn out the light, obsessive-compulsive thoughts start spinning through my brain, which leave me feeling anxious and strangely hyper.  When I finally do fall asleep for a disgustingly short amount of time, vivid and exhausting dreams fill my slumber.  I wake up feeling like I just ran a marathon in 110 degree heat.

I know this is part of my postpartum psycho-problem.  I keep trying to tell myself that the weird, random, disturbing thoughts my head gets stuck on are irrational and that I need to just let them go, but it’s so much easier said than done.

To be perfectly honest, I’m starting to worry that I may end up in the psycho ward at the local nuthouse while doctors try to figure out what the hell is wrong with my brain and pump me full of experimental drugs to knock me out.

Now, this is also an irrational fear.  I am not crazy.  I am suffering from extreme fatigue and exhaustion.  This is not a new thing.  I have dealt with insomnia since I can remember.  Every time it hits like this, I panic while I try to stumble my way through the cloudy existence that smothers my daily activities.  Eventually, it passes for a period of time before it inevitably rears its ugly face once again.

It’s a hideous cycle.  The fear oh my god I’m never going to get a good night’s sleep again leads to even more anxiety and obsessive-compulsive thoughts, making it nearly impossible to sleep.  Which, of course, makes that fear hit harder.  And so on and so forth.

It’s just one of those shitty things I struggle with.

I should have seen it coming.  I have been dealing with a horrendous amount of stress and other crap the last few weeks that is probably enough to send even the sanest of the sane babbling like a crazed lunatic.

*sigh*

Happy freaking Mother’s Day.

Can I have a weekend do-over?  Wait, scratch that.  I just want some quality, dreamless sleep.

Current Mood: Alarmed

Okay, so I really suck at schedules and bedtimes.  I’m great at being on time for things, but just really bad about being in and out of bed at a good time.

I lack the discipline or something.  Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’m a freaking insomniac.  But whatever… *sigh*.

Unfortunately, James is even worse about schedules and bedtime than I am.  To make matters even crappier, he has no concept of being on time, either.  Okay, well, that wasn’t fair.  Now that he’s been with me for almost a decade, he’s more on time than he used to be.  Meaning, instead of showing up three hours late, he’s only five minutes past the time he was supposed to be somewhere.  And once in awhile, he’s actually there just as the minute hand hits the appropriate number.

But this week, we’re trying something different.  We are attempting to be slightly more mature than usual and get on a more “normal human” (as opposed to a nocturnal) schedule.

You want to know why?

It’s for two reasons.  1) I’ve been so fatigued lately that any day now I’m going to fall face-first into the floor while teaching a dance lesson and be out for a month solid while drool unknowingly leaks out my head and damages our wood floors; and 2) I’ve been avoiding the stink-eye from Julie’s preschool teacher when I pick her up with bags under her eyes.

Don’t get me wrong, Julie’s preschool teacher is wonderful… but come on… only someone blind, deaf, and dumb would miss that fact that my child is undeniably wiped out more than the other kids by the end of the school day.

For some reason the words yes Ms. L, it’s because my daughter went to bed at midnight and woke up at 7 this morning… in fact, that’s pretty standard for our family don’t seem like the *smartest* thing to proclaim.

YES, I FULLY ADMIT I CAN BE A CRAPPY PARENT.  DID YOU KNOW THAT I BRING MY KIDS TO THE SWING DANCE CLUB WITH ME ALMOST EVERY WEEK UNTIL ALL HOURS OF THE NIGHT, TOO?

Phew.  Just had to get that off my chest. Back to my point.

So we’re setting some goals this week that seem reasonable enough.  Our goal for this week?  To get Julie to bed around 9:00 (we were a little late with that today, but not too bad), and to get ourselves in bed by 11:00. Oh, and for me to actually get up at a decent time in the morning.  The whole point being that hopefully by getting to bed earlier I’ll fall asleep sometime before the wee hours of the morning and be able to get some quality shut-eye before my kids wake up.

Now, someone please inform April of our new plan.  It’s already past 10:30 p.m., and she’s screaming like a banshee in her crib.

It’s my bedtime.  Why the heck doesn’t she get that?

Current Mood: Alarmed

I’ve decided that James is trying to kill me.

For real.

If you know nothing else about me, know these two things:  1) I have to take happy pills to keep from stepping in front of a speeding bus; and 2) I have to sleep or I turn into a blubbering zombie who cannot function AT ALL.

(Now that I think about it, there’s a number three you should know:  I always write the unspeakable, and I don’t care if it offends people- ha ha haaaa!)

But back to the point.  There’s a caveat to the second one (or, like, two or three or six of them).

The first being, until Prozac made its grand life-saving appearance into my insane presence, I was a terrible insomniac who couldn’t fall asleep for the majority of the night.  The second being that, even with Prozac, I have a lot of trouble sleeping.

For instance, if I have to wake up to pee, or to comfort one of the kids, or do ANYTHING that forces me to use my brain at all, then I usually can’t go back to sleep.

So clearly, being married to the middle-of-the-night-ball-scratcher named James has a few contraindications.

Meaning, I can’t sleep in the same room with him 90% of the time!

Because he’s annoying!  Because he’s obnoxious!  Because he has an itchy butt crack and balls (by the way- don’t they make like a powder for that or something?)!

But most of all because of this:

He has developed this ridiculously annoying habit of waking up SUPER early, like 4 or 5, sometimes 6 in the morning, and he lays there in bed wiggling.  Like, his brain turns on, and even if he’s trying to be still, I can feel the strain of his muscles as he tries to stop himself from picking his nose.

To make matters worse, I am incredibly sensitive to noise and movement and everything else under the sun when I’m asleep.  So of course, the second his brain starts to awake from it’s flopping-around slumber, I start to wake up, too.

This morning at about 6 a.m. was one of those such moments.  This is after the two times during the night that he woke me up because he decided his knee needed to be wedged into my back.

By the way, we have a king-sized bed, and I sleep on about 1/10 of the right side while he takes up the rest of the thing.

Anyway, then he started to sniffle.  Quietly, but still.  I could hear the runny snot just trying to ooze its way out of his nostril.  After four impeccably spread-out sniffles, I finally growled, “James, get up and blow your nose.”

He answered with a grumpy “Hurmph”, and laid in bed for another irritating 10 minutes without sniffling in which I could feel the bed shake under his strain to not sniffle or scratch his balls.

In the meantime, my brain flipped on and started writing a blog about the event.  It took me another 25 minutes to fall back to sleep while my darling husband finally got up, took a shower, made as much noise as humanly possibly getting clothes out of the dresser, and finally left our bedroom.  Oh, I was wearing earplugs and could still hear every part of this.

And by the way, yesterday he was whining about how tired he was because he had to get up with April once in the middle of the night.

Seriously?  I have ZERO sympathy.

I think today I am going to buy a bed to set up in the dance room, which is on the other end of the house and virtually sound-proof from the bedrooms.

And I’ll set Julie’s potty chair up in there for my middle-of-the-night pee routine.

Current Mood: Mischievous