Tag: Sleeping

Waking Up Early

June 13, 2024

This school year, because the kid switched to a different school, we had to start our days earlier. Her old school started at 8:20, and we were a five-minute walk from it, while her new school started at 7:20, and it was a 30-minute subway ride with a walk to top it off. It would be easy to say that our whole life shifted back an hour and fifteen minutes. Not an enormous amount of time, but being that we are a family that is made up of a bunch of anti-morning people, it was a heavy lift.

Ten months later, the wife and the kid still hate getting up early. I do, too… But I get up a half hour before them, which affords me the opportunity to exorcise my anti-morning-ness out of my system, so I am chipper enough to get the day started, and also annoy then crap out of them.

But, as the school year draws to a close, and Summer vacation starts, I foresee that our child will not want to get up before 8am. And if my wife had her way, and she does work from home, a 7am wakeup call would be her preference.

As for me… I’m toying with the idea of keeping the 5:30 alarm. Now, hear me out…

I don’t love getting up at 5:30am, but I have to admit that I can do it, and it doesn’t ruin the rest of my day. I could, and I stress “could,” get up early and head to the gym? My best friend does that; out early, gets the day started with a win, feels good, and has a positive attitude toward the day… or at least that’s what he tells me. That would be nice to have. I could also get up early and work. I would have about an hour and a half to myself to get my writing done.

I could list a couple of reasons why I don’t want to do this, and maybe even make a couple of jokes. Yet, I think, and I know, that my life is transitioning to a different phase. I’m a middle-aged dad and husband. I’m not in my twenties or thirties, and I am getting older. That doesn’t mean that I should slow down, or start to act like my parents did at this age. But I have to acknowledge that things change, and approaches to living change, and that’s okay.

It’s just a different way to live.

Lack of Sleep

October 2, 2023

Oh, lord in heaven… we did not sleep last night in our home.

The kid had sleeping issues, and it was difficult for her to fall asleep. Every half hour she was up, and it went on until 1am. This doesn’t happen very often, as the kid is a great sleeper. She always has been. Even as a baby, once you put her down, she was out. In fact, we stopped telling other parents about how well our daughter slept because we could just feel the red-hot hatred and contempt that would get shot at us from our sleep deprived friends.

But this was hard. I think a little of it had to do with the Sunday Night Blues, and not wanting to go to school after a fun weekend. Also, I think she got a little too wound up after dinner with TV, and video games. Normally we turn screens off a half hour before bed, but we slipped up as parents. And once the kid starts having difficulty sleeping, it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy. She gets so worked up that she’s not falling asleep right away that she starts worrying that she’ll never fall asleep.

What we were left with was a family all worn out in the morning, but we powered through it.

For me and the wife, who seemed to have lived most of our life without enough sleep, it just felt par for the course.

But, oh, the kid… poor kid. This was a special kind of awful that she wasn’t sure how to deal with. She was quiet, this morning, but she got up, ate breakfast, and got ready. We left on time, and made it to school early, in fact. But, it was her being quiet the whole time which was the tell that she was not having any of this.

I wish I could tell her that life as a grown up isn’t normally like this, but this is what life as a grown up is like. You never get enough sleep.

And when you do sleep, you wake up early for no reason at all.

Rain Sounds and Rumbling Thunder

April 20, 2023

The kid has been having issues with falling asleep lately. Polling the other parents at her school, this seems like a very common phenomenon that is occurring in many households at bedtime; kids just don’t want to go to sleep. For my daughter, her unwillingness to go to bed falls in two categories; scary dreams, and FOMO.

When it comes to scary dreams, the wife and I have been working with the kid by reading stories and books where the hero character over comes a fear or anxiety. We also talk to her about focusing on the best parts of her day, or what she would like to do the next day. This generally works. The FOMO, on the other hand, has everything to do with mom and dad watching cool tv shows after she’s in bed. She’s already an eager fan of prestige television.

The other night, the wife came up with an idea to help the kid fall asleep, which was to play an eight-hour track of rain sounds and rumbling thunder. The results of this addition to our nighttime routine has been wonderful, as the kid easily and quickly falls asleep. No scary dreams, no fear of missing out on what happens next to Ted Lasso. Just a calm and peaceful sleeping child and the gentle rolling of rain and thunder.

There is another side effect of this sound addition to our home; I have discovered that I remember all the lyrics to “Riders on the Storm.” (If you know the song, you know what I am talking about.) And I can’t help myself. The second the rain sound starts in the kid’s room, I begin hearing Jerry Scheff’s bass, Ray Manzarek’s Rhodes piano, and John Densmore’s drums. Then my inner Jim Morrison comes out, and the lyrics just roll along with the thunder. It might not be the best song to sing to your kid before she goes to bed, but she doesn’t seem to mind.