Me Gusta Dormir (Oh, How I Love to Sleep!)
Hmm, I haven't posted in a week, have I? It's been one of those weeks where I think my family must have assumed the body snatchers swooped in and borrowed Mom again. (Well, Terence knows better. He knows what a monster PMS and monthly cycles are, and I think he hunkers down and waits for the storm to pass.) I'm starting to feel myself again. . . or at least I would feel myself if I had gotten a decent stretch of sleep last night.
Sleep, that wondrous state of bliss when you can actually get it! But the bane of my existence when I cannot get enough. Insomnia, crying babies, snoring husbands, electronic distractions, riveting novels, uncomfortable bodies or beds, and blood-curdling nightmares have all conspired to rob me of precious sleep in the past. I can still remember lying in my bed as a teenager and watching my digital clock countdown the minutes and stressing because I couldn't fall asleep during that very short stretch I had available to sleep. (I slept almost as little my junior year of high school as I did as a mom with a 6 month old baby.)
In my own way I'm a picky sleeper. I cannot sleep with a TV on in the background. Not unless I am so exhausted I'm nearly delirious. Sharing a hotel room with family members who had to have a TV on to go to sleep was awful when I was younger. I had a pitched battle with Erin when we started sharing a room in college because she is a TV sleeper also. I selfishly dug in my heels, and Erin gave in, leaving us TV-less in the bedroom. (I do remember her falling asleep fairly often on the living room couch though, TV on in the background.) Snoring was also the bane of my sleeping life, another thing that made sharing a room challenging. My mission was a nightmare in this regard because there were almost always at least four of us sharing a room, and the odds were that someone would be a snorer. I only survived because I went to sleep with a Walkman blaring music into my ears every night. (Someday I'll probably be deaf because of that. Sometimes it had to be very loud to drown out the window-rattling snores.)
Getting married was even harder. I quickly began to see that having separate his and hers bedroom suites was not necessarily a sign of coldness towards each other! Terence likes falling asleep to the TV also, but we never had an extra TV in the early days, so that was a non-issue. But holy moly, did the man snore! Shake the bed kind of snoring!! I usually got by because I would try to fall asleep before he came to bed and hope that I would stay dead to the world when the snores started up. But he also would stop breathing and that would wake me with a jolt way too often. I would nudge him until he started breathing again. If his snoring woke me up, I would shove at him until he would roll over and shift position, giving me about a five minute snore-less window to try and fall asleep again. It was not a pretty picture. When Terence finally got formally diagnosed with sleep apnea and started sleeping with a CPAP machine, the quality of my own sleep improved tremendously!! We've got a system worked out now, a multi-layer plan that lets me sleep as much as humanly possible. I go to bed first (sometimes hours ahead of Terence) so I'm most likely deeply asleep when he comes to bed. He puts on headphones and watches some Star Trek episodes on the laptop next to the bed, and I can't hear a thing (unless I snuggle up to him for some reason, then I tend to hear Will Riker's voice even through the headphones). When he finally starts to get sleepy he puts his CPAP machine on and off he goes into quiet slumber. (The CPAP machine noise doesn't bother me at all, thank goodness.) It's a great system, and even when I wake up in the middle of the night, I can get back to sleep without my husband keeping me awake.
Too bad I have kids. Nothing disrupts my sleep more than having a baby sleeping in my room with me (as S is currently doing). Except having to deal with a crying baby woken up by her night owl sisters, hence why S is sleeping in my room again. But man, moving to the couch so that you can let your baby girl cry herself back to sleep sure does a number on your quality of rest. But it's either that or jerk awake every few minutes as she whimpers or moans or cries a little before dozing off again. And she's quite capable of getting herself back to sleep on her own if I leave her alone, so I don't want to interfere.
Still, between late night conversation with Terence on the phone, a good book I had trouble putting down, and S's 2am wakeful session, I think I may have had about 4 hours of broken sleep last night. One good thing about leaving the baby stage behind will be better stretches of sleep! One can dream, anyway!
Sleep, that wondrous state of bliss when you can actually get it! But the bane of my existence when I cannot get enough. Insomnia, crying babies, snoring husbands, electronic distractions, riveting novels, uncomfortable bodies or beds, and blood-curdling nightmares have all conspired to rob me of precious sleep in the past. I can still remember lying in my bed as a teenager and watching my digital clock countdown the minutes and stressing because I couldn't fall asleep during that very short stretch I had available to sleep. (I slept almost as little my junior year of high school as I did as a mom with a 6 month old baby.)
In my own way I'm a picky sleeper. I cannot sleep with a TV on in the background. Not unless I am so exhausted I'm nearly delirious. Sharing a hotel room with family members who had to have a TV on to go to sleep was awful when I was younger. I had a pitched battle with Erin when we started sharing a room in college because she is a TV sleeper also. I selfishly dug in my heels, and Erin gave in, leaving us TV-less in the bedroom. (I do remember her falling asleep fairly often on the living room couch though, TV on in the background.) Snoring was also the bane of my sleeping life, another thing that made sharing a room challenging. My mission was a nightmare in this regard because there were almost always at least four of us sharing a room, and the odds were that someone would be a snorer. I only survived because I went to sleep with a Walkman blaring music into my ears every night. (Someday I'll probably be deaf because of that. Sometimes it had to be very loud to drown out the window-rattling snores.)
Getting married was even harder. I quickly began to see that having separate his and hers bedroom suites was not necessarily a sign of coldness towards each other! Terence likes falling asleep to the TV also, but we never had an extra TV in the early days, so that was a non-issue. But holy moly, did the man snore! Shake the bed kind of snoring!! I usually got by because I would try to fall asleep before he came to bed and hope that I would stay dead to the world when the snores started up. But he also would stop breathing and that would wake me with a jolt way too often. I would nudge him until he started breathing again. If his snoring woke me up, I would shove at him until he would roll over and shift position, giving me about a five minute snore-less window to try and fall asleep again. It was not a pretty picture. When Terence finally got formally diagnosed with sleep apnea and started sleeping with a CPAP machine, the quality of my own sleep improved tremendously!! We've got a system worked out now, a multi-layer plan that lets me sleep as much as humanly possible. I go to bed first (sometimes hours ahead of Terence) so I'm most likely deeply asleep when he comes to bed. He puts on headphones and watches some Star Trek episodes on the laptop next to the bed, and I can't hear a thing (unless I snuggle up to him for some reason, then I tend to hear Will Riker's voice even through the headphones). When he finally starts to get sleepy he puts his CPAP machine on and off he goes into quiet slumber. (The CPAP machine noise doesn't bother me at all, thank goodness.) It's a great system, and even when I wake up in the middle of the night, I can get back to sleep without my husband keeping me awake.
Too bad I have kids. Nothing disrupts my sleep more than having a baby sleeping in my room with me (as S is currently doing). Except having to deal with a crying baby woken up by her night owl sisters, hence why S is sleeping in my room again. But man, moving to the couch so that you can let your baby girl cry herself back to sleep sure does a number on your quality of rest. But it's either that or jerk awake every few minutes as she whimpers or moans or cries a little before dozing off again. And she's quite capable of getting herself back to sleep on her own if I leave her alone, so I don't want to interfere.
Still, between late night conversation with Terence on the phone, a good book I had trouble putting down, and S's 2am wakeful session, I think I may have had about 4 hours of broken sleep last night. One good thing about leaving the baby stage behind will be better stretches of sleep! One can dream, anyway!
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