The last night

If all goes according to plan, and if God wills, this should be the last night that Shawn is gone for awhile.

I don't mind saying, I miss him.

Tomorrow he flies home from Vancouver through Minneapolis and NYC (LaGuardia).   It will be a very long day for him.  I am supposed to pick him up at midnight in Syracuse.

I pray God keeps him safe and surrounds his airplanes with heavenly angels to bring him home.

I sometimes don't feel like going to bed when I am out of synch and out of sorts.  Tonight I don't feel like going to bed.  I haven't been able to eat dinner.  I have a lump in my throat. 

But tomorrow is another day, and I have things I need to do.

It is a good time for a bedtime Bible verse:

Psalm 127:2 (ESV)
In vain you rise early and stay up late,
toiling for food to eat -- 
for He grants sleep to those He loves.

Five ways to prevent bad dreams

I have a longer, prosier post to share on this subject, but today I'd just like to give you five things you can do to reduce the number of bad dreams you have.

(1)  Do not watch horror movies or occultish TV shows, and do not read scary books.  I find that even when things do not seem the least bit frightening during the day, at night the images they stimulated my mind to store can go sour and become terrifying.  I vigilantly work to protect my mind from cataloging fodder for nightmares.

(2)  Do not eat meat or cheese after 7 p.m. in the evening.  Rich foods require your body chemistry to work hard to metabolize them.  When your body is working hard on metabolism, your body temperature tends to go up.  And when your body temperature is a bit higher than normal, you are at higher risk of bad dreams.

(3)  Sleep in a cool room with good air exchange.  Hot, stuffy rooms can raise your body temperature and induce bad dreams in much the same way that rich food does.

(4)  Deliberately meditate on good things as you fall asleep.  My favorite sleep thoughts:  the attributes of God (start here for an alphabetical list of them).

(5)  Make peace.  Live at peace with others and with God so that disturbing thoughts of hurt, anger, fear and unforgiveness do not plague you in the night hours.

Sleeping with a bad back

This is not a panacea, so don't get the wrong idea.  It's just one small idea.

When my back hurts a lot, sometimes it helps to sleep on a sofa.

Ordinarily, I cannot sleep flat on my back.  It hurts my stomach, for one thing.  And I find it generally uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, when my back and neck are in spasms, all of my regular sleep positions exacerbate the pain.  At the same time, the one position that offers some relief for my back (flat on my back) is not a position in which I can sleep.

However, I can sleep on my back on a sofa if I pull up my knees and lean them gently against the back of the sofa.

Do you suffer from back pain?  If so, what sleep positions have you found helpful?

Sleep and the Spring Equinox

Today marks the day when the daylight hours begin to exceed the dark, night hours in a 24-hour day.

My spirits always begin to rise as soon as we get past the Winter Solstice which is also usually my birthday and right before Christmas.  My spirits rise because at that point, the days begin to lengthen rather than shorten, and that is a very encouraging thought, even though the daylight hours are still short in mid-winter.

Today we mark the beginning of my favorite quarter of the year, the time between the Vernal Equinox and the Summer Solstice.  Today there is equal sunlight and darkness, and after today... after today the darkness will recede while the daylight hours lengthen until we reach that glorious day, the longest day of the year, the Summer Solstice.

I am surprised that there is no major holiday on the Summer Solstice (it's June 20 this year).  Christmas is at the Winter Solstice, Easter is near the Vernal Equinox, and Halloween is (loosely) near the Autumnal Equinox.  All we have around Summer Solstice time is the Fourth of July.  It always seems strange (and wasteful) that on the holiday nearest the Summer Solstice, we wait for the long hours of sunshine to pass so we can shoot off fireworks in the dark.  But whatever.  We have some nice parades and picnics.  I guess God didn't figure we needed much additional cheer on the longest day of the year; just its being what it is is gift enough.

So... I guess it's time to get out of hibernatory mode and start to enjoy the light.  We're good until September 22 when the Autumnal Equinox arrives, after which the days once again begin to be shorter than the nights.

I always feel a little bit panicked between the Summer Solstice and the Autumnal Equinox, as the days are shortening, even though they are still on their long half of the year.

After the Autumnal Equinox until the Winter Solstice, I downright fight depression.  But after many years of this, at least I always know that I will be feeling quite a bit better, even by January 1.

But today, today I bask in the glory of the next three months, the hope, the light, the promise.

And I will need a little less sleep,

and the bright mornings will be sweet,

and the warmth of the sun will soothe my muscles and melt my mouth into a smile.

Use your day well.  Tire yourself in a healthy way during the daylight.  And then sleep at peace.

Too much travel

My husband has been traveling too much.

When he travels, I get really tired.  The trouble is, so does he.  That puts us at risk for conflict, because each of us thinks the other should feel sorry for... well, I don't know how to put it succinctly and grammatically, but I think he should feel sorry for me, and he thinks I should feel sorry for him.


He's in Las Vegas on the 20th floor of some schmantzy hotel with a fabulous view of the strip.

I am here, being woken up by small dogs who bark at me to serve them their food and let them out in the morning.

It's warm, unseasonably warm, and I slept fine without the bed warmer.  The sun is shining and I should be light of heart.

I need to buy tickets to the high school musical in which Jon is playing his trumpet.  I also need to run errands: the drugstore and the Dollar Store.  I need to scoop poop out of the backyard, wash the kitchen floor, vacuum the better part of the downstairs, do two loads of laundry, walk the dogs and figure out what to make for supper.  Of course there are always dishes to be washed, and I haven't made the beds yet.  I should change my sheets, but I'll wait until right before Shawn gets home so they're fresh for him.  A couple nights of sleeping in less-than-fresh sheets is no big deal for me.  I wash my face and feet before I go to bed, but I shower in the morning (well, at any rate, I shower before I go out for the day).

If I went out and got a massage and a pedicure, it might be easier for me to feel sorry for Shawn when he gets home.

But I probably won't do that.

Another Bedtime Bible Reading

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;
    my soul thirsts for you;
my flesh faints for you,
    as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. 

So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary,
    beholding your power and glory. 

Because your steadfast love is better than life,
    my lips will praise you. 

So I will bless you as long as I live;
    in your name I will lift up my hands.

 

My soul will be satisfied as with fat and rich food,
    and my mouth will praise you with joyful lips, 

when I remember you upon my bed,
    and meditate on you in the watches of the night; 

for you have been my help,
    and in the shadow of your wings I will sing for joy. 

 My soul clings to you;
    your right hand upholds me.

Psalm 63:1-8, ESV

Daylight Savings Time -- Five reasons to pitch it

I do not like Daylight Savings Time.  In fact, I think I hate it.

1.  Daylight Savings Time messes with our sleep cycles something awful.  It is worst in the fall when we gain an hour.  But it is plenty bad in the spring when we lose an hour, too.  When I was young, I thought it was cool to gain an hour.  Later in life, when I had small children, I realized that babies sleep when they sleep, and an extra hour is never applied to their night, so adding an extra hour to one of their days just makes them tired and cranky for many more days.  We did not have quite this same problem with losing an hour in the spring, but...

2.   Losing an hour in the spring is psychologically defeating.  We finally get to March, longer daylight hours, and sunrise before the school bus arrives at 6:55 a.m.  Then... we turn our clocks ahead so that we essentially get up at 5:something a.m. instead of 6:something a.m. and it is dark in the morning all over again (my husband calls it, "getting up at O-Dark-Hundred").

3.  Daylight Savings Time makes me sick.  Literally.  I feel sick for at least a week each time I jerk the time around.  Although I recognize that my fibromyalgia and other extenuating factors make Daylight Savings a bigger hardship for me than for many heartier people, research shows that productivity at work lags during the days after a time change.

4.  There is no good reason for the time change.  A few sane states have abolished it.  It is simply a dinosaur, a social experiment turned tradition which we carry out each year, twice, with no reason or explanation.

 5.  I don't think God meant us to play with time, hence there are not good results when we do.   Noon should be noon, when the sun is at its apex, and time should proceed with that as a marking point, an absolute, a standard.  We ought not mess with the rhythm of life.  Period.  The end.

Alarm clock woes

Do you ever struggle with your alarm clock?

My older son, David, does incredibly weird things with his.  For one thing, his clock is set one hour and ten minutes ahead of regular time.

(I cannot imagine what he is going to do this weekend when we "spring ahead" for Daylight Savings.)

There are times when David wakes up in the middle of the night and resets his clock, or his alarm.  Sometimes he does this in his sleep and is unaware.

Surprisingly, I think I've only had to rescue him in the morning twice all year.

This morning it was me that messed up, though.

Two nights ago, going to bed after the momentous occasion of David's Junior Saxophone Recital, I turned off my alarm because I was so shot.  Also because I knew that I would panic and be completely unable to sleep if I was anticipating an alarm at 6:30 a.m.  By a decision made in advance, we slept in until we woke naturally, and I drove my younger son to school late.

That was two nights ago.  And that night I did not get a good rest.  So last night I was again exhausted when I went to bed... exhausted, not overstimulated like the previous night, and having consumed the maximum recommended dose of Valerian capsules.

I forgot to turn my alarm back on.

So we overslept again.  This time it was not on purpose.  I woke up at 7:49 and delivered Jon to school (travel mug of coffee in hand) by 8:03.  Rather than feeling discouraged, I am pretty impressed with myself.

I came home and did a few things, mostly breakfasty ones.  Then my husband, who was upstairs getting ready to go to work, asked me if I wanted him to make the bed.  I said no.

I crawled in and took a nap until 11:21.  Taking a nap was on my to-do list yesterday, but it took until this morning to get around to it.

Dealing with a non-ideal night.

Last night I had a lot of trouble getting to sleep.

I was exhausted because we had a HUGE day, my son David's Junior Saxophone Recital.  Technically, it started at 8 p.m. (although we'd all been preparing our separate parts for days, David for weeks and months).  The music finished at 9:30, and the reception was over a bit after 10:30.  By 11 p.m. we were driving home, and by midnight we had unloaded the van and put most of the leftover food away.

There is still a giant cooler containing a few cans of soda, sitting between my mudroom and my kitchen table.  A bin full of unidentified dry goods graces the family room.

There's only so much you can take care of when you are that tired.  I was tired enough to simply drop, but once I hit the sheets, I could not get to sleep.

No matter how I lay, one or the other of my arms was bent awkwardly and would go numb and tingly within a few moments.  I couldn't get comfortable.

I know I do not wish for an arm amputation.  I know that.  I had to keep reminding myself that.

My mind was so full of all the events of the night, I couldn't even focus on the attributes of God.

And this was after two cups of nice, hot Valerian tea.

Some nights you just have to give in.  You can't get too bent out of shape about it.  You have to let your mind spin, and lie there in the dark trying to be still and warm.  If you don't freak out and panic, you will eventually fall asleep.

At about 1 a.m. when we were all trying to go to bed, I told my younger son, Jonathan, "I'm too tired to get you up for school tomorrow morning.  You can get yourself up.  Or if you can't, I'll just get you up when I wake up, and I'll take you to school then.  You need your sleep, too.  It's a Monday for goodness' sake."

I fell asleep at about 2:23 a.m.  I woke up shortly before 8 a.m. without an alarm clock.  I took Jonathan to school after we'd sort-of-breakfasted*, arriving a little before 9 a.m.

And life continues.

*There is an odd phenomenon that when you are getting a ton of food ready for a holiday or special event,
 the normal cooking and shopping doesn't happen, 
and in the end you are often at a loss for, say, eggs... 
and bread that could be toasted for breakfast.