To Sleep Perchance to Dream

Dear Sleep,

Why do you elude me so? Why can you not simply overtake me as soon as my head hits the pillow, ignoring any non-emergency noises or disturbances? If this is not to be, please try not to impact my ability to function as a normal (normal? what’s that?) human being. Please do not make me achy and cranky as retribution for not spending more time with you. Some things are simply out of my control.

Appreciatively,

Andrea

P.S. And do you mind toning it down on the dreams? Some of my dreams are so active I think I’m more tired when I wake up than I was when I went to sleep!

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I’m having trouble sleeping. Except for the vividly active dreams, I actually sleep pretty well when I get the chance to sleep. The chance to sleep seems to be eluding me, and the reasons vary daily. Saturday night I stayed up WAY too late (3AM!), knowing that Tree Faerie was going to wake me around 7AM. I tried napping when she napped on Sunday, but I still didn’t feel rested. I had hoped to go to bed early on Sunday night, but we stayed up and watched Ghost Rider, which was actually a pretty good movie. I let Tree Faerie fall asleep on my chest at her bedtime instead of going through the whole bedtime routine of changing clothes, a Baby Rub ™, a story, and then nursing and rocking to sleep. I think this messed up our night, because she woke up every 2 hours or so to be comforted or nursed. After one of these moments of comfort, I’d gotten her back down and crawled into bed, only to be disturbed by a tick-tick-tick-click-click-click.

DTTF was on the laptop.

I tried to ignore it, but instead I just got frustrated. While I was trying to find a nice way to tell him to KNOCK IT OFF!!!, I turned over and looked at him. Apparently the look on my face was enough to cause him to pause and ask me why I was looking at him. I had not yet formulated the nice words to ask him to please either go into the other room to do that or put it away and come to bed, so he didn’t get the nice words. I don’t remember WHAT I said to him, but I know it was not nice or pleasant. I love my husband dearly, for he immediately put the laptop away, turned off his light, and snuggled down in bed.

Still, we were up around 7AM yesterday, and I don’t get a chance to nap on the weekdays after work. Even if I HAD gotten Tree Faerie to take a good nap in the evening, we had Taekwando last night. I was SOOO tired and achy during class, and my balance was not up to par. After we got home last night, we went through the bedtime routine, adding a little playtime in as well, but I had a hard time getting her to stay asleep.

Once I actually got her in bed, I still had to feed our ball python, Aradia. (***Warning: the next part of the paragraph may not be suitable for all readers. If you have an extremely weak stomach, please skip to the next set of ***.) We’ve had Aradia for almost 3 years, and we’ve always fed her frozen mice (thawed, of course), and now frozen rats. To me, this is the most humane way to feed a snake, not to mention it’s also cleaner and healthier. For some reason, though, she starts with the butt first 90% of the time, which is completely backwards to the way it’s SUPPOSED to go! Of course, she ate last night’s rat backwards, so it took forever!

***Because this took so long, I actually lay in the floor next to her feeding box and dozed off while waiting for her to finish. Our cat Storm kept trying to distract Aradia, so I finally shut Storm in the bathroom. DTTF suggested that I just let them be, at which point I bit off his head, chewed it up really well, and spat it out on the floor, then proceeded to shut the cat in the bathroom. Once again, DTTF proved how wonderful he truly is by not biting back, which I truly appreciate. He understood that exhaustion was talking, and not his sweet, loving wife.

Needless to say, I know it was much later than I wanted it to be when I finally crawled in bed, so today I’m suffering once again from sleep deprivation. I feel like I’m swimming through pea soup (I’ve never even seen real pea soup, so I actually have no idea what consistency it is, but I imagine swimming through it would feel a lot like what I’m feeling now) and trying to get my brain to at least function at 50% of normal, because I HAVE to finish this project!

I can hardly wait for tomorrow, when I know I’ll once again have to get up at 7AM, but at least I’ll be able to take a short nap when Tree Faerie goes down for a nap around 9! Plus, my brain can take a break, too!