The wisdom of nap regulation

Yesterday was gray and windy and rainy. I got up in the morning as usual and went to church, came home, cooked a big breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage and toast, put a roast into the slow-cooker with potatoes, carrots and onions, unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher and found myself to be rather WEARY after all that labor.

So I thought I'd go upstairs to my room where it's nice and quiet and where I could hear the rain pattering down and occasional cars driving by, their tires making soft splashy noises on the road. I had my book with me and I read for a little bit, but somewhere along the line, I fell fast asleep. So fast asleep that I wasn't even aware when Aisling came and got in bed with me and cuddled up with her back against mine and that's really saying something because Aisling is a restless person and takes a while to get settled and generally makes you feel like you're on a very small ship on a very high sea as she flops and flounders and arranges her pillows and covers herself up three or four times with her fleece throw and then decides to get up and blow her nose and then gets back on the bed and turns on the television and then drops the remote on the floor and then....and then....and then....

But I neither heard her nor felt her, and when I woke up two and a half hours later, I was completely disoriented and couldn't figure out what time it was or even what day it was, for that matter. But when I lifted my head off the pillow, her head popped up too.

"Hi, Mom!" she said with an amount of good cheer that I found almost unbearable three seconds after waking. "Boy, did you ever sleep for a long time! I bet you won't go to sleep tonight! I went to sleep too so I won't be tired either and maybe we can stay up together and watch a movie on the DVR!"

"Tomorrow's a school day," I replied, having thought it over and decided that yes, it was indeed Sunday. "How long did I sleep?"

"Two and a half hours," she said, "And Daddy said not to wake you up because you'd be grumpy and blame him for letting me wake you up."

"Preposterous," I said. "I only blame him for things like that on days that end in an A."

Aisling looked at me, brow furrowed. "But I don't think that...." Light dawned; she smiled. "Ohhhh, I get it."

As it turned out, she was right about me. She claimed to be having trouble sleeping and came grumpily downstairs at midnight, ate half a peanut butter sandwich and drank a glass of milk and talked my ear off while I sat moodily contemplating the kitchen sink; for lack of anything better to do, I'd cleaned all the leftovers out of the laundry room fridge. That was nearly three hours ago and I've seen neither hide nor hair of her, so I'm assuming she finally fell asleep.

I, on the other hand, am staring down a busy Monday with a feeling of grim dislike. Oh, how I wish I'd set the alarm on my cell phone and not let myself sleep longer than half an hour!

Things that go HRRRRAAAAUUUGGHHHH in the night

I woke up at 1:30 last night in the clammy throes of a terrible Jurassic Park-style nightmare about a mastodon. In my dream, I was by myself trying to protect the girls from the huge beast, urging them to crouch down in some tall grass to keep it from seeing us.

Unfortunately, it did. And it began to charge us. I was screaming at the girls to run, run!!! And I, accompanied by my non-bending knee even in this stupid dream, was trying to move along as quickly as I could, without much success.

It bore down on me, huge and hairy, and I thought in anguish about the girls, who would likely become a tempting dessert, a couple of tasty morsels, after a satisfying dinner of me. I could almost feel its breath on the back of my neck and I wincing, anticipating the skewering with a mighty tusk, hoping that my impending chompage WASN'T GOING TO HURT MUCH, when all of a sudden, I jerked awake and lay there in the darkness, regrouping, breathing.

It was such a relief to open my eyes and see that I wasn't huddled in the itchy weeds of a prehistoric prairie, but rather in my own bed. The bed that I share with my husband. The husband who was blissfully asleep, lying flat on his back with his arms comfortably arranged behind his head. The head with the nose and mouth from which were emerging a series of noises not unlike what the enraged trumpeting of a hungry mastodon might be imagined to sound like.

"HUURRRRRRROOOONNNKKKK!!!!!" he proclaimed, with the bedcovers tidily pulled up to his chin. "HRRRRAAAUUGHHH!!!"

"Honey," I whispered urgently, giving him a poke in the side.

"Ow-don't-poke," he replied groggily in a cross voice.

"Honey, turn on your side. You're snoring like an angry mastodon."

He turned over on his side, fiercely keeping his eyes buttoned shut. "I-can't-snore-don't-do," he said with dignity. More than his share of the blankets went with him as he rolled, but that was okay because I was damp and disheveled from the scary dream anyway.

I got out of bed and got a drink and wiped off my face with a cool washcloth, went back to the bedroom and quietly rearranged the bedclothes from the tangle I'd left them in. With my pillows plumped back up and my heart rate returned to normal, I climbed back in bed and curled up on my left side, putting my chilly toes on my big microwave heating bag at the bottom of the bed, which still amazingly retained some warmth.

Unfortunately, my getting back into bed disturbed my husband's delicate slumber, and as I settled down, he twitched and said distinctly, "THE BENGALS WERE ROBBED" and rolled to his back again.

The next sound I heard as I drifted off to sleep was, not surprisingly, "HRRRRRAAAAAAUUNK!!!"

"Honey?"

"HRRRRAAAARRRRRRRNNN!!!"

"HONEY!!!"

In the still of the night

Like many of you, I sometimes wake up in the night just because I hit a patch of wakefulness that's been randomly tossed in there with the REM cycles. "I'm a little bored with sleeping right now," I say to myself. "And the house is quiet....I can go downstairs and get a few things done.....have a little peace...turn on the television without someone's bitterly saying, 'You watch the boringest shows'....." And then I get up and completely enjoy myself, even though I'm pretty sleepy and, okay, a little grouchy by the next afternoon.

But then there are those times like, oh, RIGHT NOW. Many of us experience this, too: I am suddenly jerked awake by who-knows-what, and immediately upon the return of my consciousness I am thinking that there's some important paperwork regarding our health insurance that must be filled out and mailed in, and I forgot to make an appointment at the optometrist, and there's a winter storm warning, and I need to contact the public library and make sure I have the dates set for the second semester Shakespeare class, and then there's a trip to the travel agent to give her the first payment for the Stratford Festival trip, and with this cold snap? What is our gas bill likely to be? The thermostat is going out on the SUV and my husband had a hard time keeping ice from forming on the windshield on his way home from work, and will the plumber actually come today to see why the drains are acting the way they're acting, or will it be another day of no-show?

Then my thoughts stray from my internal Things to Do List to the more negatively ephemeral: Oh, God, a terrorist tried to blow up a plane on Christmas Day....and some judge in Vermont sentenced a child rapist for sixty days after he was found guilty for having a sexual relationship with a little girl for four years, starting when she was six. The molester was let out of on $10,000 bail and promptly raped a three-year-old....Is this going to be a good year in car sales or are we going to have another year of struggling to stay afloat?....Is a sick family member going to be okay, or is there going to be one of those middle-of-the-night phone calls?

I hate it, don't you? When your eyes fly open in the middle of the night and the weight of the world comes crashing down? It's bad enough having that default setting in your mind that runs like a news trailer, reminding you of all the things you need to do to keep life running smoothly at your house, but when you start in on the misery of suicide bombers and baby rapers and sick relatives, it drives sleep from you like a strong wind topples a garbage bin and blows trash down the street.

Maybe tomorrow will be a better night for all of us.

Trashy woman

Yesterday I wrote that I would "sleep really well tonight" because I was so worn out by our first day of school and I should have known better not to tempt fate or Mother Nature or the Sandman or whoever the being is who's dropping the ball on my nocturnal life.

I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER.

Because about half an hour before we went to bed, my husband tried to ensure my night of restful sleep by telling me how much money we don't have. That conversation was the equivalent of chewing about a pound of coffee beans and washing them down with a Red Bull.

Then, when I finally fell asleep, I slept well. For three hours. At which point the garbage truck lumbered onto our quiet sleep and proceeded to do this:

RRR-RRR RRR-RRR RRR-RRR *CRASH!* RRR-RRR RRR-RRR RRR-RRR *CRASH!* *SMASH!* RRR-RRR RRR-RRR
RRR-RRR *SLAAAAAAM!!!*

Then it moved on to the next house and repeated the entire process, rrr-rrring, crashing, smashing and slamming. And to the next. And the next. And. The. Next. It sounded like enough garbage was being picked up to cover the entire square footage of, oh, I don't know, UTAH. Maybe Texas?

I did find out something interesting about the way sound travels: When the bedroom windows are open, every sound is magnified ten thousand times in direct correlation to how fervidly it will jar you into a state of jangling alertness. A squirrel farting gently in its treetop nest, then, will sound like nothing more clamorous than the opening of a two-liter bottle of Dr. Pepper. But a garbage truck? It will sound nothing short of apocalyptic. As if the four horsemen were grazing their steeds on your lawn while they waited patiently for the truck's big arms to come down and grasp your bin in a death-grip.

By the time the garbage truck left the neighborhood, every nerve in my pumpkin-shaped body was zinging like the strings of a badly-played zither. I got shakily out of bed, noting in passing that the overnight temperature had plunged to about thirteen degrees, putting on my robe and picking up my library book with weary resignation.

Next week, I plan to SHUT THE WINDOWS on Tuesday night before we turn in, even if we have to marinate in our own sweat while we sleep. The garbage truck is too much for me.

Just when you thought it was safe to sit on the couch...

Remember the Snuggie from the cable television commercial last winter? Those backwards oversized fleece bathrobes that were supposed to take the place of skimpy sofa throws that expose your feet or shoulders to chilly drafts? The commercial featured pictures of people eating popcorn, working on their laptops, roasting marshmallows out back while gathered 'round the bonfire or -- most memorably -- cheering at a soccer game in maroon Snuggies and looking like members of some deranged (yet cozy-warm) cult. They were simply unspeakable. It was impossible to watch them with your mouth closed.

For all you people who don't watch television, first of all, what is wrong with you? Second of all, just watch this:



Okay. So now that you have either 1) refreshed your memory about the horror that is the Snuggie; or 2) seen for the first time this sign that the apocalypse is upon us, try to wrap your mind around the fact that I have just seen a commercial that informed my twitching, slack-jawed self that the Snuggie now comes in DESIGNER PATTERNS.

Yes. Yes, it is true.

You can now get yourself a Snuggie in fashionable leopard or zebra prints as well as a tasteful classic camel color. These were made, the Snuggie manufacturers claim, because many people had been requesting "a more stylish Snuggie."

A. More. Stylish. Snuggie.

Yes.

Okay. So who exactly are the people who felt such passion for a backwards fleece bathrobe that they needed to have one spotted like a leopard or striped like a zebra? Or unicolored like a camel?

I just got this little mental movie of me and my husband being invited over to play cards one Novembery evening with some friends. Some little snacks are graciously set out; drinks are offered. Soon the agreeable snap of cards being shuffled fills the air; the hostess rises to her feet and says, "I'm a little chilly. I'll be right back."

When she returns, she's wearing a Snuggie. And she has more draped over her arm. Her husband jumps up and says, "Thanks, hon! It is a little nippy tonight!" and then she proffers one to my husband -- the maroon one? -- and offers the leopard one to me. I take it silently and put my arms in it because one size fits all. We play cards, but then it turns out that the chocolate covered peanuts were dipped in arsenic and they've sent one of their children outside to disconnect our brakes.

No wonder I never get any sleep.

I blame the Snuggie.


If you feel you must look, here's a picture of some poor soul wearing the leopard print one.

Now that is strange

Today I have done something that I don't think I've done since I was, oh, maybe four months old; I'll have to ask my parents: I slept, pretty much uninterruptedly, for eleven hours. ELEVEN.

That's usually about how much sleep it feels like I get in a week, so you can understand my sense of wonder and accomplishment. That cough medicine is some powerful stuff!

I don't like to take sleepy-making cough medicine very much because it makes me have the weirdest dreams, completely unlike taking sleepy-making allergy medicine, which just makes me, well, go to sleep. After slugging down three teaspoons of this cough medicine two nights ago, I dreamed that I left my husband to go off on a wild, romantic tangent with Heath Ledger, something that is completely unlike my usual staid and church-ladyish Catholic self. Not to mention the fact that Heath -- God rest his soul -- is no longer with us. This morning, I have a vague memory of dreaming that I went to the circus and got first one balloon, then two, then three and finally so many that my feet lifted off the ground and I went up, up, up and was dismayed when my sandals fell off.

It didn't take as many balloons as you might have thought, which is the very essence of dream-ness. Well, that and running off with a willing Heath Ledger.

I guess the strange dreams are better than the experience one of my friends had when taking this particular brand of cough syrup, though. She totally hallucinated and claims that Jesus was walking around her bedroom carrying a lantern.

"How do you know it was a hallucination?" I asked. "There are many saints who have seen Jesus, like St. Anthony of Padua and St. Margaret Mary Alacoque."

"Well, first of all, I am not a saint," she replied smartly. "And second of all, when I sat up in bed and said, 'Jesus, what are you doing here?' to him, he ignored me and just kept on pacing around with his lantern. But my husband growled, 'Lie down and go back to sleep, willya?' I don't think Jesus would have ignored me if he were really there. And he probably would have said something to my husband for being so grumpy to me when I was sick."

I had to concede the point. And I've also kept an eye on her over the years, and if she's a saint-becoming, she's got a heck of a long way to go. HAHAHAHAHAAA!!! (I can get away with saying that because I'm sick and under the influence of cough medicine. Snaa-a-ap!)

Cross as two sticks

I am sitting here at my desk typing this post at 3:49 a.m. in spite of the fact that I didn't go to bed last night until 4:30 a.m., and then had to go teach my three-hour Shakespeare class today with eyes like two holes burned in a blanket and the tendency to start like a nervous horse every time my students made loud noises, like blinking.

I was very excited about going to bed tonight.

So imagine my dismay when I got upstairs and discovered two things:

1) my allergies were acting up, resulting in about fourteen sneezes in a row. The sneezes brought murmurs from members of my trying-to-get-to-sleep family

2) it was a very humid evening due to rainy weather -- humid and cool, my least favorite weather, like, EVER. Which meant that sticking my feet under the sheet and blanket felt like sticking my feet into a folded damp bath towel.

I thought these two things were adequate reasons as to why we should turn on the central air, but my husband demurred. Or maybe "demurred" is too soft a word. Actually, what he did was look at me with an expression of incredulity, as if my desire for a humidity-free home was so insanely diva-like and spoiled, I had suddenly metamorphosed into Barbra Streisand, Beyoncé, Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez, all at the same time. Try to imagine the hairdo, the outfit, the fingernails that would go along with such a transformation, I dare you. Then NONE of us will sleep.

The sneezy feeling continued and I slept very, very lightly for about an hour and a half. I know that many of you who read here have dealt with this same thing, so we all know how frustrating this is: one moment, you're so sleepy you'd have to use orange traffic pylons to prop your eyes open, and the next minute, you are completely wide awake, thinking, "But I have to get up in FOUR HOURS." It is a bitter experience.

I tried to go back to sleep, I really did. But it is a wild, windy thunderstormy night out there. The window right next to my head was rattling in its frame like a drawer full of silverware and lightning kept flashing in my eyes annoyingly. I think many of us can agree that achieving sleep is difficult at the best of times, but just about flippin' impossible if there's someone standing by your head, turning a high powered flashlight off and on at random intervals.

So I got my glasses and my lip balm and my book and trundled downstairs, muttering, because that's where the Benadryl is. I usually take just one, but considering that I couldn't sleep AND I started with the sneezing again as soon as my feet hit the floor, I TOOK TWO, PEOPLE. I'll regret that tomorrow when my eyelashes are picking up lint off the carpets due to residual drowsiness, but for right now, I am starting to feel those first faint vestigial stirrings of delicious sleepiness.

It's still rainy and windy, but the thunder and lightning have moved on to torment some other insomniac thirty miles east of me. I have a pleasantly creepy Dean Koontz book to read (I like his creepy books because goodness and love and loyal friendship always win out in the end, which is a requirement for me in any fiction I read) and I think I'll go back upstairs now and see if I can persuade my eyes to close.

Meanwhile, here's a great Walt Disney Silly Symphonies cartoon from 1938 featuring the great old-fashioned animation and the words to Eugene Fields' famous nighty-night poem, "Wynken, Blynken and Nod."

In the horrors

I woke up briefly at 4:45 am, stretched my feet lazily into the depths of the warm bed, and thought, "Mmmmm, Sunday...how delicious! A lovely long day to enjoy, Mass this afternoon, dinner and then early to bed...." I drowsily snuggled my head into my pillow and let my entire body sink back into oblivion.

And then I remembered. My eyes snapped open like old-fashioned roller blinds; my body stiffened, every synapse leaping like a drop of water on a hot griddle. Sunday? No, Monday. MONDAY. Monday in January! How many freaking Mondays come in the month of January? Because it seems like we've had at least eight of them and we're only, what? -- feverishly, I counted on my fingers and stifled a wail -- halfway through the month? The holidays, disappointing as they were, are over and done with and even though we spent the entire two weeks wheezing and hacking and taking one another's temperatures and passing around a snowman-shaped candy dish filled with zinc lozenges and cough drops, at least it was vacation.

I flopped over onto my pillows in despair. Why does there have to be a January? With all the cold and snow and ice and disappointment that there are no more presents or Christmas cookies to be offered (especially those peanut butter ones with the Hershey's kiss perched cheekily in the middle), it has absolutely nothing to recommend it.

I slumped downstairs and turned on the morning news, only to find that snow is expected today with an accumulation of possibly more than an inch. No sun at all, and the house is a cluttered mess from the weekend that makes me twitchy and miserable.

Mondays. Januarys. I must remember that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. In particular, I must remember that when I get to about five o'clock this afternoon and my desire to give someone a sharpish clout on the back of the head begins to overtake me. I'm told all mothers feel like this at five o'clock p.m. and that I should just relax and have a cup of tea, and I wish I knew who originally came up with that ridiculous notion, because I would like to give her a sharpish clout on the back of the head. Tea, indeed.

Tick tock

I have not been able to sleep more than four or five hours per night for the last four nights and my head feels like a boiled onion.

Although, I have to say that Operation Tidykleen (OT) is made much easier when I'm super tired because OT is fueled by the fact that I shout at family members like a drill sergeant: "Pick that up! Put it away! Bury it! Burn it! Mail it to Australia, I don't care! The only thing that belongs on the piano bench is someone's rear end and maybe some piano music. Not socks! Not half a peanut butter sandwich! Not the curling iron or a volleyball!" When I'm tired, I'm already halfway to shouting as soon as I come downstairs in the morning. I'm a fun person, I am! My husband and children are permanently disgruntled and Wimzie tries to hide under the couch every time I walk into the room where she's lounging, but my house is very, very clean.

This morning I woke up at around 2:15 and stupidly let my mind drift to bills that are coming due and school books that we have to buy for the coming year and what if gas prices soar to $8 per gallon and the sun suddenly blows up? Just the kind of thoughts you want to entertain if your goal is to immediately snap wide awake with eyes that look like a bush baby's. Why are those always the kind of thoughts that assail us all in a moment of wakefulness? Why can't people ever wake up in the night and think blissfully, "I'm brilliant, I don't owe Vectren any money, and I have the best hair, like, ever!" Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy???

Don't feel good

I haven't slept through the night for the past six nights and it has finally caught up with me. I don't feel good.

A frustrating pattern has emerged: I take a medication that my dad told me will work more efficaciously if I take it at night, according to an article he read on some online news source. So when I swallow this pill, I use water to wash it down, naturally. I sometimes take ibuprofen at night if my damaged knee is hurting, which it often does in the winter's cold, and I take a swig of water with that, too. And then there's my great big giant enormous glucosamine tablet, so big that I keep expecting to have to use one of those enormous pill syringes that vets use to get medicine down the throats of horses. That thing takes a big gulp of water to send it on its way.

With all that medicine and the accompanying gulps of water I take right before bed, you can probably see where I'm going with this, right?

I have a bladder that seems to hold about a teaspoon of pee. I know that you yourself were lying awake wondering about that, so you're welcome. This is made even worse by the fact that I had two babies with bowling ball heads who pressed mercilessly against my pelvic floor for months on end., weakening the muscles. You're welcome again. And I know from everything my doctor and assorted women's magazines tell me that I should be sitting here kegeling madly as I type, but I don't. Kegel, that is. If I kegeled as much as I type, I could probably drink a 55 gallon drum of iced tea through a straw and have the fortitude to hold it in all night long. Really, you don't have to keep thanking me.

So. At about four o'clock every stinking morning for the last six, I've gotten up to pee and haven't been able to get back to sleep. Once I'm awake, my mind buzzes like a hive of bees, thinking about all the stuff I need to get done. February is going to be a busy month and I have deadlines looming for several different projects I'm working on and aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh.....

Wide awake at four a.m. is not a good thing to be. Especially since I haven't been able to catch up on the sleep I've missed. Oh, I have fallen asleep in the afternoons here and there -- I can't help it; I get so drowsy -- but that tends to make things worse. Sleeping during the day only makes me tend to go to bed later at night. Which is what you might call "counterproductive."

I was so frustrated by sleeplessness that I took a Benadryl capsule last night; the only thing that came of it was that I slept until five a.m. instead of four and nearly wet myself trying to get to the bathroom an hour past my usual time.

So I don't feel good. I feel a little whiny and achey. I feel bone-tired and grouchy. I have PMS and a sour outlook on life. The girls are on my last available nerve. The house is an absolute wreck -- the dining room table is a mess both over and under, there are dishes in the sink and dust all over the television screen. The sky outside is the depressing color of skim milk.

I know my cousins Lilly, Susie and Carol all suffer from insomnia. At a Mom's Night Out gathering a few months ago, I found that the entire table of eight women all have chronic problems with not enough sleep. I wonder if all our combined issues of little pains and nervous tummies and headaches, forgetfulness and irritability can all be chalked up to the fact that we rarely have a decent night's rest?

If that's true, no wonder there's such a proliferation of sleep medications advertising on television lately -- Lunesta, Ambien, Rozerem -- all of them urging the bleary-eyed contingent to call their doctors.

In the still of the night

I had a very difficult time getting to sleep last night. I tried squooshing my pillow, poofing my pillow, sheet on, sheet off, right side, left side...I did everything but hit myself in the head with a wrench like Moe on The Three Stooges.

I dozed fitfully, waking up at least a thousand times to get a drink, to go to the bathroom, to get a drink, to go to the bathroom, etc. I looked out the bathroom window, I looked out my bedroom windows: nothing was going on. Not even a stray cat trying to get to the empty tuna cans in our neatly boxed trash, set out at the curb for the morning garbage pick up.

The alarm went off at 6:30 and I tried unsuccessfully to get my husband to scratch my back WITH HIS HANDS and not his dumb feet like he did last week, but he kept tickling me instead. So when he went to walk the dogs, I padded downstairs with my hair sticking up everywhere and had a peanut butter sandwich with a banana on it. As I was sitting there at the table, I honestly felt like my head was going to pitch forward onto my plate. Can you die by suffocation in a peanut butter sandwich?

"I didn't sleep well last night," I said to my husband as he came through the kitchen, making a sound of disgust when he saw my sandwich.

"I didn't either," he said. "I tossed and turned all night long. I couldn't get comfortable. And you snored."

"Snored?" I said indignantly. "How could I snore, I ask you, if I was hardly ever asleep?" I took a large bite of my sandwich.

"Breathing heavily, then," he said, grinning and grabbing a Power Bar from the basket on top of the microwave. "Ver-ree, ver-ree heavily."

"You thnore too," I said by way of rejoinder, my mouth full of peanut butter. "You thnore like a band thaw."

He went on into the foyer to turn the thermostat back up its normal two degrees to our daytime temperature. "Hey," he called. "I know why we couldn't sleep last night. I forgot to turn down the AC!"

Who would have ever thought that two little degrees could make such a difference?

I went back upstairs at nine o'clock and got in bed, thinking that I was now sleepy enough that I could drift off easily. Wimzie came up with me and made herself into a tidy bundle at the foot of the bed where the fan could blow her bangs out of her eyes. I fell asleep and was totally unconscious until I heard a tap-tap-tapping on the door.

"Whaa-?" I said thickly, regretting the peanut butter sandwich.

"It's us," said Meelyn, coming into the room. Aisling followed her, bouncing. "Are you ever going to get up? Because it's ten past eleven. Are we going to the pool? Are we going to get lunch? Do you want to scrapbook? What time do we have to be at the gym for open court tonight?"

"Stop! Stop!" I said, covering my head with my pillow. "Have mercy!"

"Didn't you sleep well last night, Mommy?" she asked as Aisling continued to bounce around the room, singing.

"No," I said, pulling the sheet up under my chin and closing my eyes firmly. "I had an awful night of sleep."

Aisling stopped singing and said, "So did I. I was too hot. I got up at three o'clock and went to the bathroom and took off my pajama pants."

"I was hot, too," said Meelyn. "I usually sleep with my sheet and my comforter on, but I kept throwing off my comforter, and then I'd get too cold and put it back on, and then I'd be too hot again."

"Did you squoosh your pillow and then poof your pillow?" I asked.

"Yup," she said.

"My pillows fell on the floor," offered Aisling.

"Well, Daddy forgot to turn down the air conditioning last night. That's why we were all so hot."

"Daddy is a bad, bad man," Aisling said thoughtfully.

"I don't know if I'd go that far," I said. "But he does tickle people. And he snores, too."

Sleeping disorder

One of the things about my sleeping disorder that really makes me get on my own nerves is that if I wake up during the night, for any reason at all, I'm generally up for the duration. My mind starts whirling around, contemplating all the things I have to do in the coming day; calculating how overdue the library books are; hoping that I'll rememher to transfer those chicken breasts from the freezer to the refrigerator when I get downstairs later. It's so silly.

Right now, for instance, I am up. It isn't the middle of the night, but it's pretty darned close. It's 5:30 a.m. and I just happened to wake up ever so slightly about ten minutes ago. Even though I didn't go to bed last night until well after midnight. This irks me because now I'm going to be really, really tired this afternoon (and with me, "tired" is usually accompanied by her best friend, "mean") and I have a lot to do.

My husband always reasonably says, "Why don't you just stay in bed?" but then again, he's also the person who reasonably says, "Why do you have to spend money?" and he should know that there are some questions in life that just can't be answered, no matter how much you'd like to slap the person who asked them. The reason I don't stay in bed is because I've been doing this for so long and I know I won't go back to sleep, I just know it. And being trapped in bed, in the dark, with many thoughts racing around in my head, is just horrible.

I know I'm not the only person who does this. If all those commercials for sleep aids on television are any indication, there are a lot of people like me out there. That one guy who can't sleep because he has a lot of stress at work apparently travels extensively with a beaver, Abraham Lincoln and a deep-sea diver. I just have Meelyn, Aisling and the dogs with me, but they're definitely real and they get mad at me when I'm grouchy, unlike that imaginary Abraham Lincoln, who seems to have a very nurturing personality.

Another commercial depicts the people who have taunting bedside lamps that float around just out of reach. One lamp is named "can't get to sleep" and the other is called "can't stay asleep" and I wonder how those people in that commercial would feel if both of those lamps were pursuing them?

The reason why I snapped awake this morning is because I'm excited. I'm leaving tomorrow as soon as Lilly gets here to drive down to Carol's house in southern Indiana. Then we're all going to pile into Carol's super-hot new SUV and drive down to Susie's house in Kentucky to spend the weekend at our annual CousinFest. Susie lives in a big house with a pool next to a golf course and all three of her guest rooms have en suite bathrooms, so you can imagine how stoked Lilly, Carol and I are about that.

So even though I've made out packing lists that include such minutiae as "four cotton balls" and "brown strappy sandals with medium heel," I'm still quivering with the need to buy a travel-sized toothpaste and wondering if I should buy two small plastic bottles for decanting the shampoo and conditioner that's already in the shower, or whether I should just buy two new full-sized bottles, since the shampoo and conditioner we already have are more than halfway down.

It's fun to be up so early thinking about shampoo, just really spectacular. I keep telling myself that.

Wide awake

It's 2:10 a.m. and I am sitting here, just as wide awake as anyone could ever hope to be. It makes me really sad that I no longer have a nursing baby, because what kind of opportunity would this be? A chance to be wide awake in the middle of the night instead of being crushed and otherwise diminished by a need for sleep. There would be no need to worry about the baby latching on to the wrong part of the breast and slurping a giant hickey, frustrated because nothing is coming out, Mom! No need to worry about putting my hand in poop while changing the post-nurse diaper.

I'm awake!

I tried to go to sleep at midnight. I put down my book, told myself that it was nice and cool in the house, settled into my most comfortable position. I made myself think soft thoughts about how wonderful the blanket felt and how peaceful it is to hear the dairy trucks going by on the street outside, but one big, jangling thought came in and rumbled all the sweet little meditations away.

Did I put the detergent into the dishwasher and turn it on, or did I just put it into the dishwasher and leave the dishes sitting?

It's amazing how one thought can make such a freakish nuisance of itself because really, does it matter about the dishes? It's not like they're going to unload themselves and spend a couple of hours drawing up signs and picketing the kitchen: "Better Working ConDISHons for DISHes!"

I place my head in several different poses on my pillow -- pillow smashed up, pillow smooshed down, pillow folded over -- but it won't cooperate. All I can think about are the dishes.

Trudging downstairs, I go to the kitchen. The dishwasher is all finished; the green light is on signaling that the cycle is done.

I come to sit down at the computer. The dishwasher's cycle may be finished, but it looks like mine might be starting up again.

Cinnamon Bread

I made it until 4:30 this morning, waking up to pee and then realizing that my nose was stuffy and my mouth was dry. I came back from the bathroom, already half knowing that I was not going to be able to breathe easily when my head hit the pillow -- heaven knows that I love the pretty spring flowers and blooming trees just as much as the next girl, but they kill me.

My climbing back into bed makes my husband stir. He turns over, heavy with sleep, and says in a groggily cheerful voice, "Hello! I'm pleased to meet you!"

"What?" I ask, surly. Sometimes when I stir in the middle of the night, it jolts him into speech. He's capable of coming up with some really funny stuff, once sitting bolt upright with his arms held out, palms up, in front of him. "Please," he urged me earnestly, his eyes still tightly closed, "will you hold this tray?"

This time, he simply repeats, "I'm pleased to meet you," a little more distinctly and lapses into gentle snores.

"I'm pleased to meet you, too," I sigh, and punch my pillow into a more comfortable shape, wondering if he was selling cars in his sleep. Or maybe he was dreaming about meeting me, all those years ago. I stretch out without really relaxing, breathing through my mouth, thinking that if he's dreaming about me in my mid-twenties -- thinner, bright of eye, with that bloom of youth -- he's going to be sorely disappointed if he wakes up now and sees me -- fat, congested, with mad hair in a pointy ponytail. Out of respect for my marriage, I sneak out of bed and head downstairs, pulling on a sweatshirt over my nightgown and pushing my feet into my yellow Crocs.

Downstairs, what is there to do? There are library books a-plenty. There is allergy medicine. There is EWTN and this new blog. But there is also a bread machine sitting on the kitchen counter and I am inspired.

My bread machine is about ten years old and makes 1 1/2 pound loaves of oddly-shaped bread. If I need to produce an aesthetically pleasing loaf, I put it on the dough setting and pull it out for the last rising, baking it in the oven in a regular loaf pan. But today, there is no one I need to impress, so I decide to let the machine do it all.

The recipe for cinnamon raisin bread is pretty simple: warm water, bread flour, two tablespoons of dry milk powder, salt, sugar, cinnamon, butter, yeast. A very basic, easy bread that I can throw together in about fifteen minutes. There is enough time that this loaf will finish baking just as the alarm clocks go off upstairs.

We will have coffee for breakfast, rich with cream, and homemade cinnamon raisin bread toast. With butter. Everyone will be pleased when the scent of baking bread and brewing coffee drifts up the stairs. Meelyn will want her coffee in her huge Starbucks mug and Aisling will wait until my back is turned before using half a stick of butter on her toast. She will look at me in all innocence as I tell her to put some of it back: yes, I know there are crumbs, but she's not eating all that butter. Aisling will comply, wounded, feeling that her motives in not wishing to put back the butter are perfectly pure: the next family member to come along will be offended by the toast crumbs. I assure her that we'll cope. Meelyn will roll her eyes above the rim of her mug and get out her math book.


Aisling's favorite kitchen
implement.


I'll have my buttered cinnamon raisin bread, with coffee as black as I can bear it, hoping that it will have restorative powers after this, my fifth night in this cycle of wakefulness.

I Couldn't Sleep a Wink Last Night

There's never a bad time for a Frank Sinatra song. At least, that's what my grandma always thought. Unless, of course, it is descriptive of one's state of being. Which is, for me, awake.


Frank couldn't sleep a wink last night and neither could I. We both
look a little bit tired.

Frank was singing about a fight with his beloved that had rendered him wakeful, waiting through the night until it was a decent hour for making a phone call. That wasn't my problem; my beloved was sound asleep in bed beside me and as I turned over and grumpily put my feet outside the covers, he woke up for a split second and said, "Are you getting up again?" Then he took both of my pillows and snuggled happily down, claiming my space as well as his.

I've been up for the past four nights, reading, cleaning, looking out the windows at the dark city streets and puttering around on the computer. Sometimes it's really irritating not to be able to sleep, but most of the time, I don't mind too much. It's about the only way I can claim a few moments of peace.

Last night, I was in the mood for a little company, so I turned the television in the living room on to EWTN and half-watched a program about the Divine Mercy while I answered emails. I can't watch 24-hour news stations in the middle of the night, for fear that bad news from around the globe will keep me awake forever. I also don't watch HGTV or TLC during times of the day when Lowe's isn't open. That's just frustrating, and when I'm awake, my goal is to soothe myself enough so that I can go back to sleep, not work myself up about not being able to go right out and buy that recommended UV protectant marine varnish for my antique front door.

So I sat and dealt with my email, which might not seem like a very restful thing to do, but it was the email that was keeping me awake in the first place. It's been a busy week for me and my two daughters, Meelyn, 14, and Aisling (pronounced "Ashleen"), 11. As homeschoolers we are in a state of perpetual motion, but this week has been busier than ever. I serve our Indianapolis area homeschool group as the activities coordinator and it seems like I always have fourteen or fifteen emails, none of which can be answered with a simple yes or no, waiting in my inbox. I plowed through all of them, setting aside one particularly thorny one to answer later. I felt happy and peaceful, glowing with a sense of accomplishment.

I heard my husband's feet hit the floor overhead and a moment later he came down the stairs to walk the dogs, addressing me with our standard morning greeting.

"How long have you been up?" he asked through a yawn.

"Oh, since around 4:30. It hasn't been too bad. I was just getting ready to come back upstairs."

"Do you want me to send the dogs up when we get back?"

"Only if their feet aren't wet," I replied. "It's been raining."

My husband went to leash the dogs and I went upstairs to my room, climbing into the bed and burrowing into a warm hollow, drowsy and content. As I lay there dozing, my husband said, "Go find Mommy!" from the foot of the stairs and I heard the dogs thundering up to my room, thumping onto the bed, their paws wet on the pale yellow matelassé coverlet, their noses wet on my cheeks. "Hi. Yes. Good morning. I love you, too," I murmur. "Now settle."

The dogs both flop down, sighing heavily, slipping into sleep as easily as a carnival-won goldfish slips from a plastic bag into a bowl of water. As if they haven't been doing that very thing for the past nine or ten hours. Lucky, I think, and then I drift away too, unaware of my husband coming in from his shower, dressing for work, leaving. Although I do retain some slight memory of his kiss on my cheek.

I wake up two hours later in a pool of feeble sunlight, both dogs stretched out to full length. I feel revived, glad that I was able to go back to bed this morning. Some days I can't.

I wonder how many emails I'll get today, and head off for the shower.