What Do YOU Do In Bed?

How much importance do you place on sleep? I mean this in all seriousness because last night I actually slept for a whole seven-and-a-bit hours which is two hours more than I usually allow myself. And when I say *I* allow myself, what I really mean is, what Bloggityville will allow me to have.

Blogging/reading other blogs is a sickess, folks. If you’re one of the twelve people who don’t currently have a blog of your own, run! RUN AWAY FROM THE LIGHT!

I, however, am a lost cause. I will be blogging when I’m ninety.

But back to the point.

Sleep. It’s such an afterthought, isn’t it? We all have the best of intentions when it comes to getting enough sleep, but most of us fall short. I woke up this morning a whole lot more rested than usual and just generally more enthusiastic about life. This didn’t translate into actually achieving a whole lot mind you, but babysteps…

How much is an ideal night’s sleep for you? I don’t know about anyone else, but I often find it worse to oversleep, the three times of the year that actually happens (birthday, Mother’s Day and a spare!) Because my body is so used to 5 or 6 hours, eight hours can sometimes be too much all at once. I would love to be sleeping that long, consistently, but I’d have to build up to it or I’d walk around feeling like a truck ran over me all day long.

Our school days start at 7am when Master J wanders into our bedroom to make sure a parent wakes up with enough time to feed and clothe him before the taxi arrives at 7:45. We, on the other hand, set the alarm for 6:45 and then hit snooze - purely to take the ‘edge’ off waking up - because we know J wakes up far earlier than we do and his stomach is a powerful internal reasoning device. This way we have a three-pronged approach to starting our day - initial alarm, snooze button and hungry child. The latter totally trumps both of the others by the way. He’ll keep coming in to rouse us every 4 minutes until we finally get our butts out of bed. Oh, but when I say ‘we’, I almost always mean ‘me’. Talented Hubby never has any trouble getting a full eight hours every single night because I’m the sucker that lets him do it, LOL.

After my feet have hit the floor, my mornings currently look something like this:

• Breakfast for awake children
• Finish packing the lunchboxes (I seriously do not know how I would manage having to actually make sandwiches in the mornings. I make/set out everything I need the night before, wrapping and refrigerating the necessary bits, and in the morning I dump it all in a lunchbox and ta-da).
• Supervise dressing.
• Help with shoes and socks.
• Supervise Do kids’ teeth-brushing.
• Panic when I realise it is now 7:47 and the taxi is probably already waiting in our driveway.
• Wave goodbye to Master J and apologise to our taxi driver for being late out…again.
• Spend five minutes breathing, something I usually don’t get the time to do until then. Oh, and I pee. See previous reason.
• Re-wake Miss Moo, who has usually ignored my wake up call in the first place. Make her breakfast
• Shoes, teeth for Boofah while Miss Moo s l o w l y eats her breakfast. That child is strange. She does not like toast and turns her nose up at most cereals which don’t feature a cartoon character (of which I refuse to buy more than, oh, seven boxes a week) so she will almost always have bread with peanut butter. Woe betide the unsuspecting soul who actually toasts her bread (Nana’s been caught out a couple of times!) My child eats sandwiches for breakfast. I guess it could be worse really. Sigh.
• If I’m really lucky I will have time for a cup of tea right about now. I won’t have time to drink the whole thing, but the three sips I do manage taste like (liquid) manna from heaven.
• Then rush, rush, rush to get Boof and Miss Moo, not to mention myself, completely ready to walk out the door. On my schedule, I have departure time set at 8:40. I have not made 8:40 since sometime last year, and that was because we needed to be at school early for one of them to go on an excursion, the bus driver being a cantankerous old fuddy who threatened to leave without any child who showed up late. Every other day, we bolt out the door closer to 8:55. The bell rings at 9 and we live 6 minutes walk away. It’s a good day when we make it to school before the bell rather than after it. You would think living so close would mean we’d be early. Not so. It’s a false sense of security.
• I stay in Miss Moo’s classroom (depending on the day) for reading and then when I get home, sometime around 9:30, I finally get some breakfast of my own and move on with my day.

All that nifty stuff that is listed on my Basic Daily Plan under my Morning Routine - the unloading dishwasher, putting on a load of laundry etc? Never gets done. Could you just imagine how productive I could be if I just stuck to my own schedule? Wow. If I actually rose at 6 I might even be able to have some breakfast and quiet time before the children are awake. What a novel concept!

That theory has one major flaw. I’m not a morning person. I hate waking up. The deliciousness of waking up but knowing you don’t actually have to get out of bed for a while is a blessing that is lost on me completely. I’ve forgotten what it is like to wake up naturally! Did you know you can have complete dreams, with backstory and character development, in the six minutes between alarm bleeps? You totally can. When you’re having such a vivid, schizophrenic dreaming session it’s a little hard to jump up and greet the day with sunshine and brightness. And I know what you’re thinking. Why not just get up the first time the alarm sounds? Refer to the first line of this paragraph again! LOL.

If I was waking at 6:00, and aiming to get eight hours a night, I’d have to eventually be going to bed at 10:00. I just don’t see that happening. For starters, the nightly movie isn’t even finished by then! All the really good series don’t start until 9:30. But I can do 11:00. I can handle 11:00. I am on fire for 11:00!

Getting to bed by 11pm is my new goal. This past week alone - and this is not uncommon, I’m ashamed to admit - I had two nights when I went to bed later than 2:00am. Eeeek! People were never designed to survive on 4 hours sleep a night!

I know myself well enough to know getting up at 6:00 will feel like I’m dying right through to about, oh, 9:30 when I can finally stop and rest. However! If you take another peak at that schedule of mine, you’ll see I already have a Project Time (90 mins) scheduled in the afternoon. I’m glad I did this, because for the first few weeks I can use this as napping time before the Piglets get home. And then later, when I’m used to the system, that hour and a half can revert back to its original purpose, which is to give me time to pick up various household and personal projects. It’s my rest time. If I’m to get to bed at 11:00 then there’s a whole bunch of stuff I’m going to have to get done a lot earlier in the evenings. Sometimes I don’t even start my Evening Routine until after that!

Over to you - what are your sleep habits (be honest!) and how do you think they affect how you function the next day?

P.S. You may have noticed a recent lack of images - photos, graphics etc - at the tops of my posts. Mostly, this is because I’m lazy and unless it is absolutely necessary to the telling of the story I’m beginning to avoid including pretty pictures just for the sake of having something colourful above my words. Is this bothering anyone? Anyone actually missing the ‘pretties’? LOL.