Sunday, October 9, 2011

In Which I Discuss My Anti-Sleep Plan

It seems that Connor is back in insomnia mode again, which means that I'm spending a whole lot of late night hours sitting in the living room wishing that I was asleep in bed instead.  This is night number three of Connor's current sleep strike, but thankfully it's been over the weekend so Jeremy's been a sweetheart and letting me sleep in so that I'm not completely zombified.  Now that we're getting into the week, we'll see how long I stay capable of forming actual sentences. 

Since I'm forced to stay up an additional seven or so hours a night more than I would like to on regular occasions, I've developed a number of coping strategies to keep myself from passing out on the living room couch.  Here's a general timeline of activities that I pursue during my nocturnal hours:

8:00-10:30 (Level One): Sew, read intellectual books, work on chores, and do generally quiet-but-productive things, depending on how many nights in a row Connor has been on a sleep strike.  If it's been more than two days, forget anything remotely productive and skip straight to Level Two.  Drink tea and eat a bowl of ice cream.

10:30-12:30 (Level Two): Read run-of-the-mill fiction, look up funny videos on the computer, browse blogs and Facebook stalk all of my friends.  Drink more tea.  Organize my bookcase.

12:30-2:30 (Level Three): Play endless losing games of Spider Solitaire.  Refresh Facebook every five seconds to see if the three people still on have said anything.  Watch the cats stare fixedly out the windows and creep myself out by imagining they're staring at an intruder.  Read bad romance novels.  Drink more tea.  Eat more ice cream.  Make eighteen trips to the bathroom. 

2:30-4:00 (Level Four): Alternate between laughing maniacally and weeping softly into my tea.  Start trying to write something, but get distracted by how weird the word "rough" is.  Stare at the word rough until it doesn't look like a word anymore.  Raid the pantry and eat every piece of chocolate I can find.  Watch the cats run around the house like maniacs.

4:00-whenever (Level %&$#@): Rock back and forth in a corner staring at the wall and gibbering.  Drink tea.

It's currently just shy of one in the morning and Connor is still going strong (yes, I usually backdate my blogs on Insomnia Nights so they are assigned to the appropriate day), so I'm anticipating tonight I'll go at least as high as Level Four-- we'll just have to see how the evening progresses.  I'm already way, way past the point where I should be doing anything productive, like answering e-mails or attempting basic math.  Or blogging, for that matter.  You wouldn't believe what this looked like before I used spellcheck on it.

Oops!  The tea kettle is whistling, so I need to go.  Get some sleep for me, will you?

~Jess

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Jess,

I'm sorry to hear that you're not getting enough sleep I will pray that Conor starts sleeping through the night so you can too :) Tell Jeremy I think he's a great dad!

Lots of love from South Africa,
Nisha

Jess said...

Thanks-- I'll let him know!

leah said...

I really hope Connor decides to go to sleep sometime soon - or at least before you hit level 4!

And you never know what cats are staring at. There may be a velociraptor in the backyard, you know....(g)

VictoriaB said...

You may have posted about this before, so I apologize in advance. Why do you stay up at night if Connor is up? Is it to monitor him for seizures? And when he's up, is he still in his bed?

 
Blog Directory