havocandmayhem.com

The kids are out of school for summer. I go to the gym 3 days a week for about 50 minutes. So I have two choices, not go to the gym at all for 2 months or paying huge sums for 2 months of ‘unlimited’ childcare.  It’s not really unlimited, just 2 hours a day  but you can go every day. They did away with the ‘buy a block of childcare to use as needed’ option they had last year. Not going to the gym is not really an option. First, I have to pay membership dues whether I go or not so it’s a waste of money. Second, I like food & work out so I can eat the food I want, so it’s a waste of waist. If I pay the huge childcare fee I feel obligated to go at least 4 times a week & stay at least 90 minutes, or I am not getting my money’s worth. Knowing me this actually means I will just feel more guilty than usual as I lay in bed in the morning skipping the gym. Enter Dr Sleep with unexpected motivation. After looking over my sleep chart yesterday during our appointme...

So another week on the sleep regimen has passed & really, nothing too exciting to report. Mostly I fall asleep around 1am & wake up around 6. So, it seems the ‘staying asleep’ issue is improving & the ‘falling asleep’ issue still needs work. And I have cheated on the no chocolate thing a few times to the tune of 1 Reese’s Cup and 2 dozen M&Ms with no real effect one way or the other. End of story. Now on to an even better story, which is the reason for the ‘mostly’ in the opening paragraph. I checked out two books from the library on Monday & spent Monday-Wed consumed with reading them, so much so I totally lost track of time & forgot to meet the boys’ bus Tuesday & found out just what happens when no parent is waiting… They call the house & inform you the bus is at the end of the driveway & would you please go get your kids. All that angst last year about CPS… The books I read were by Connie Willis – Blackout & All Clear . They ar...

April 27, 2011 – My first visit to sleep specialist, who gave me a list of ‘clean living’ things to do over the next 8 weeks. I’ve done almost all of these things at various points over the past 9 years, but this time I will do them all AT THE SAME TIME! Give up alcohol Give up chocolate Give up caffeine Give up ALL screen time after 10pm Exercise vigorously for 20 minutes prior to sleep Get out of bed if can’t sleep after 20 minutes No going back to bed in the morning April 27 – I decided I need time (and a glass of wine) to take this lifestyle change on April 28 – I created a schedule to make this happen (the doc told me to take up to a week to give up the caffeine so I don’t feel bad dragging this out a few days) April 29 – I gave up caffeine (not too hard really, my coffee was 2/3 decaf already & Coke & Sprite are interchangeable to me, no headaches reported, despite much naysaying). I woke up at least 6 times, probably more, during...

I had an hour & half long visit with Dr. Sleep yesterday. She’s a great lady & I feel hopeful she can help me solve this problem.  If it comes to the worst case scenario, she studied at Duke, where apparently they have a world renowned sleep program & she can get me into it. I’d have to go to NC for who knows how long but we’ll cross that bridge if we come to it. There’s a good sleep program ‘locally’ though so that’d be a last resort. Why ‘locally’? Well…as with everything other medical thing in my life, the good docs (or in many cases, like this one, the ONLY special docs) are over an hour away. (My regular doc is 25 minutes away to the south & is part of a group based around a specific hospital 35 minutes away from them, with specialist scattered around that city. If I went to a doc 20 minutes to the north, they would send me to specialists 35-45 minutes further north. We drove over 90 minutes in an ice storm when I went into labor with Mayhem)   ...

A list. I generally refer to them as the Voices in My Head. You probably have Voices too, you just may call them by different names, maybe you hear your mom’s voice in your head every time you look at new shoes. “And where will you be wearing THOSE?” or maybe you simply do not acknowledge them at all, but they are there. You may only notice them after the fact, like when you are cleaning your closet and find a pair of really cute but really impractical sandals with 3 inch heels and beading and you wonder “What was I thinking when I bought these? They go with nothing in my wardrobe or in my life actually?” In my case *I* was not thinking anything. Vanity was thinking how great I’d look in them & a sundress (that I don’t own) at a pool party (that never happened). Or maybe you come home from grocery shopping & as you put your purchases away you find a tube of Sun Dried Tomato Paste and you wonder “How the heck did that get in there?” with  sudden flash of  mem...

My baby boy. The sleeping baby, the VBAC, the one who nursed for a year. The 9lb 2oz surprise that made my OB wonder how I had hid such a big baby from him those last few weeks, when he was expected to be similar to his brother’s 7lbs 7oz at birth. The one who’s infancy I remember only in disjointed moments due to rampant insomnia and 10 months of battling chronic bronchitis.  I was so very tired when he was a baby. So very glad this one slept more & cried less than the other, making it easier to care for both of them & not feel I was neglecting anyone. The one who has more than made up for those easy months by developing a stubbornness that is astounding in one so young and a tendency to solve problems with violence that we are still struggling with almost daily. The one who shrieks and wails and sobs when things don’t go the way he wants in a game, but who absolutely refuses to give up until he succeeds. Even if he cries the whole way through. The one who’s le...

Do you know what the boys did today? They WENT BACK TO SCHOOL!!!! Yippee!!! Granted it’s only for a week & half…they have half days Jan 13 & 14 and then have Jan 17 & 18 off … but it is still something. And by the 15th we’ll be happy to once again have some all day together time. I’ve got some color them yourself wooden toys as a project for the 4 day weekend. I think I never really recovered my equanimity from those two snow days right before Xmas vacation. They threw me off & today I am still trying to get stuff done I was going to do those two days. Like clean the pantry (blog post no doubt coming soon!) Like reorganize the office (also a good source of blog fodder) Like clean & scrub the utility room (not at all blog worthy) oh, and like sleep in uninterrupted. They have been up at 6am all vacation, including Jan 1, and except for Dec 31 when they got up at 4:05. I do lay in bed until 8 or so, but since I can clearly hear them fighting over toy...

6:40 – when I wake up 7:30 – when I go back to bed 9:30 – when I wake up again 8 – years I have struggled with insomnia 3 – years I took Lunesta 10 – months I have been off of it 43 – nights I have had more than 3 hours of sleep in a row 22 – days I have been congested in my chest 20 – giant horse pills of amoxicillin I have taken for bronchitis 8 – containers of pro biotic yogurt I have eaten 4 – times I have served spaghetti for supper this month 1 – times I have actually eaten it myself 6 – pounds lost while ill 7 – pounds regained in the past week ?? – cookies eaten since my appetite returned 8 – games I already owned & played this month 3 – games I have purchased this month from Big Fish Games 0 – times I have made it to the gym this month 5 – new books read so far this month .25 – crochet projects completed since school started 3- episodes of The Tudors Season 4 I have viewed so far This post inspired by Day 2s prompt in Shimelle’s Tr...

No photos and no layouts for these…yet. I feel a couple may be calling for layouts ~Sleep – sometimes more necessary than exercise I try to keep a rein on my desire to crawl back into bed after the males leave for the day. Usually I accomplish this by talking myself into going to the gym with that old adage, you’ll feel better after exercising. And really, 95% of the time I do. But DH has been gone this week and my insomnia has been worse than usual. I think I slept 2 non-consecutive hours Wed night and while I did put on my work out clothes and walked the kids to the bus stop, I came home removed those clothes & put my pjs back on. I was worn out tired. The sort of tired that might just cause me an injury at the gym. Probably I would feel good after working out. But not rested and I really really needed to feel rested. I was back in bed at 7:30. I woke up at 9:30 and thought “get up now, things to do”  then I thought “what? what do I need to do this morning? nothing. there...

Consider this a PSA that doesn’t come with a tragic tale of photos & data lost. Though, considering it has actually been since November since I did a back up, it could easily have been a tragic tale. In my mind I back up my photos to Smug Mug on a near monthly basis. In my mind I burn my digi supplies to DVD as soon as the ‘download’ folder reaches 4GB. In my mind I copy the contents of my My Personal folder to both my EHDs every 3 months. Lots of happy thoughts in my mind. Many of them involving Nathan Fillion, sushi and a deserted beach. But, unfortunately, like Nathan & beach, none of the backing up, copying & burning ever happen in real life quite the way I imagine they do. See, I have a rather selective & idiosyncratic memory due to a combination of motherhood and insomnia. Mostly I remember things that happened years ago and things that happened hours ago. Anything in between is a mystery. So if I actually remember doing a thing I assume it must have b...

One of the reasons I am no fan of travel is that I have bad hotel karma. I always end up with the room by the ice & vending machines, or the elevators, or the side entrance from the parking lot, or with a bed that as a huge dip in the middle, or the a/c that sounds like a freight train charging through the room whenever it kicks on, or with the neighbors who watch TV loudly until 3 am, or end up on a fold out couch bed with a mattress that is mere millimeters thick over hard metal bars. Hotel pillows are terrible, soft, flat things & I hate them. They are too flat to lay on one pillow but piling two of them makes the pillow too high. So I have to travel with my own pillow. Plus I travel with children who wake at the crack of dawn. When I was a child I traveled with adults who woke at the crack of dawn. Does no one I am related to by blood understand that humans are meant to stay in bed until at least 7am, 8am preferably? Oh. And I have insomnia, which makes sleep unde...

We’ve swam most days. The pool has not turned green yet but it’s early days. Heat and rain combined cannot be defeated by chemicals & filters as I learned last year but I am trying to keep ahead of it. It’s been in the 90s most of the time, hitting 101 yesterday! And it’s only June. I’d like to take them to the park or something but it’s just too damn hot. Vacation bible school was this week and the little heathens have enjoyed it for the most part, but I think they are done having to be somewhere every morning. We’ve been to both libraries. They read almost daily, but we’ve been slacking off on the workbooks. DH has been gone from 6:30a to 10p weekdays for going on 3 weeks now. I have no idea when that will end. It should have been this week but it turns out large corporations are just as disorganized and screwed up as tiny companies. Which I already knew but seems to surprise some people. I’ve baked cookies twice and been to the gym 5 times. I consider that breaki...

Today’s post is random because I am tired. I’ve been fighting the unmedicated insomnia fight since Christmas and for awhile there I was winning. After 3 solid years of Lunesta induced sleep I was off the meds and actually sleeping some, most of the time, by mid-Feb. I filled my last Lunesta prescription on Nov 30 and I still have 2 of those pills left. I would have had 5 but it’s been a hard 10 days. Sometime in late Feb the balance tipped and insomnia has been winning over half time time. For awhile there it was various aches & pains keeping me awake & Tylenol PM helped but that soon stopped working. Meditating was never more than 50% successful, neither were the various herbal teas I have tried. Lately I seem to sleep best from 5am until 9am, with a 45 minute period of wakefulness around 6:45 when I get up to get the kids ready for school. So I’ve been getting about 3 non consecutive hours of sleep lately. I’m a bit cranky as a result. Then the boys started night ...

And those 3 had to be medicated. Plus one of the insomnia nights was medicated. WTF? I pay $1.78 a pill and insomnia wins? What is keeping me awake? Nothing in particular. Just a busy brain that won’t shut off until 4am or so. I free associate thoughts all night long. No particularly stressful thoughts, just an endless stream of consciousness. Relax, relax and empty your mind, relax, drifting, nothing, calm mind, let it empty, like in that book Holy Cow, where she took the week long brain dump, I wonder if that would work, who would watch the kids if I went to it?, Brad would have to take the week off, and I’d have to fly probably. Hey! trying to sleep here, knock it off. Imagine relaxing, picture yourself in a soft bed, floating, drifting, what kind of sheets? white? what is sort of glaring, not really soothing, maybe warm cream colored sheets, flannel with a nice thick comforter, warm and relaxing and like hot chocolate, that was really good hot chocolate I made the other day w...