This here is the last post I’ll be writing on this blog at this locale. From here on out you can find me at <a href=”http://sticksandstars.com/” target=”_blank”>Sticks and Stars</a>.
It’s bedtime and I really should be going to bed but I feel a little like blogging so I’m going to do that instead. Although I’m going to try to be quick, too.
Tonight is night one of my boys’ new bedtime routine. I’m reading this parenting book that I don’t really like, partly because in a book of many hundreds of pages, I think I’ve found maybe ten of them actually useful, and partly because the authors either don’t have children or are those kind of people who have a trillion friends who love nothing more than coming over to hang out with their kids or whisk them away for playdates so that the authors can have lots and lots of sanity-saving free time and lots and lots of unrealistic expectations about the patience levels of mere human beings. But anyway, one of the things I did get out of this book (and probably tons of other books, but this time it’s sticking) is the idea to establish a bedtime routine. In general we kind of have a half-assed bedtime routine but that often means we skip out on important things and the half-assedness of it means that more often than not there is yelling, maybe from me, maybe not. So I thought that a real, official bedtime routine might make things progress more smoothly (and not result in my kids staying up until I go to bed after endless rounds of whack-a-mole where I whack them down and they just pop right back up again).
I planned to institute the routine a couple weeks ago when I first read about it, but key to the routine is having a visual aid for them to follow, apparently. No, not a chart with stars or stickers because that just teaches them that the only reason to do something is to get a reward (or so says the book), just a visual aid so that they can follow along with the steps and know where they are in the process. But the chart I invisioned included photos of them doing each task (or so demanded the book), which meant a) getting them to do each task, most likely many times until I finally remembered to take a photo, b) uploading the photos to my computer (not so hard, but more work than not doing it), and c) either hooking my printer up to my computer and dealing with the myriad problems that will arise before I am allowed to print anything or finding some other means for printing. I can tell just from typing this list that it’s too much work, so indeed, the visual aid problem stalled the whole process. Eventually I thought that I could just find images online of some other children performing the same activities and as long as they were boys and had dark, shaggy hair, my boys probably wouldn’t notice the difference, but still, that wouldn’t resolve the printing issue.
After many annoying bedtimes came and went, I realized that I needed to be a little more resourceful about this whole process. I recalled that we are a modern, 21st century family and so we needed a modern, 21st century solution. That’s right, a visual aid in the form of a PowerPoint presentation. I slapped that puppy together yesterday afternoon, each bedtime task lovingly illustrated with a cartoon animal performing said task (thank you Google image search), and just as I suspected, the boys were thrilled to see their bedtime routine on our tv, and the most exciting treat I could bestow upon either of them was choosing who got to flip to the next slide.
I definitely think there’s something to be said for bedtime routines. Usually our bedtime routine starts at about 8 with me telling the boys to start getting ready for bed and sighing inwardly because I know they will not, not, not. Then we spend the next one to two hours engaged in various levels of battle until finally I collapse in defeat onto my bed, at which point they dance around me just to prove their point and eventually heap themselves on top of me and fall asleep. But tonight I announced that it was time to start the routine at 7:30 (thinking that it would take so much longer since there are so many more items than what we usually get done) and they were in bed by 8. No, they didn’t stay in bed, but I kept my cool and didn’t yell and calmly and kindly addressed all issues that arose and they were asleep by 9. Granted, we went swimming this afternoon, which always exhausts them, but still, in their room by 8 feels pretty damned amazing to me.
Last night, for the first time in forever, I actually laid down and fell asleep. Then, I woke up in the middle of the night and actually went <em>back</em> to sleep. This morning my alarm woke me and although I was very tired, more tired than I usually feel when my alarm goes off, I figured that I have a lot of sleep to get caught up on after weeks of insomnia, so that seems reasonable. It wasn’t until I was up and checking my email (a gentle way to ease myself into my day, particularly when I feel extra tired) that I realized that I had managed to thwart myself again and had accidentally set my alarm for an hour earlier than usual.
Sigh.
But at least I had time to get a few extra things done this morning, like my school paper that I had intended to finish last night but hadn’t on account of small children and the many, many, many ways they can be distracting, and the dishes that I’m trying to keep up with every day. The other day as I was washing the dishes I thought absently to myself that someone really should invent a machine that washes dishes, I would so love to have one of those, until I remembered that, oh yeah, someone has invented one, I’m just not lucky enough to have one.
Sigh.
Sometimes I feel that dishes are the bane of my existence, that if I just didn’t have to do dishes, my quality of life would be so greatly improved. Except I know that’s not really true. If I had a dishwasher the bane of my existence would merely shift to something else, most likely my dirty, dirty floors. I’m pretty sure that if I picked up all the cereal underneath my kitchen table that I’d have an entire box. And I could probably scrape up and reconstitute enough dried, spilled milk to sufficiently serve with the cereal.
Sigh.
I mentioned that things have been somewhat dramatic at work and unfortunately the drama recently turned from not-necessarily-bad to what-the-fuck!? with people quitting and threatening to quit and emotions running fairly high and me holding out my hands and imploring, “Can’t we all just get along?!?” Luckily it all has nothing to do with me, I just find myself in the mediating middle in some cases and on the uninvolved-but-still-affected periphery in others. Today I am alone in my little cube pod, my other three cube-mates having either already quit, being on the verge of quitting, or just out sick. It’s not making me feel much like working, I’ll tell you that much.
Sigh.
Insomnia is kicking my butt. I don’t know why I’m having it so bad these past few weeks but lately I can’t fall asleep and I can’t stay asleep no matter how tired I am, and let me tell you, I’m getting pretty tired. I just cannot stop my brain from race, race, racing every time I have a quiet moment. Work, school, work, my boys, work, my boys’ dad, work. I guess mostly it’s work. And really, there’s nothing wrong with work, there’s just a lot going on, a lot of drama (not necessarily the bad kind), a lot of change, a lot of impending drama and a lot of impending change. I like change and I don’t even mind drama (or at least the not necessarily bad kind), but it’s letting the mice use my brain for a running wheel and I can’t get them to stop. Apparently mice do not need sleep either, or at least they need less than me.
I started my school program this week (should have been last week but they lost my shit in the mail) and I must say, it’s <em>so fascinating!</em> I love doing the work: I love my reading assignments and my exercises and the papers I have to write. In fact, I’ll be writing a paper tonight if I can manage to pry off the leeches for a few minutes.
The program takes a year to complete (although it’s online and work-at-your-own-pace, so I hope to be done sooner) and my first quarter covers the history of information technology (like, from the beginning of documented history) and the history of the Internet, and then HTML/XHTML and CSS. Even in just this short few days I’ve already learned so much, much more than I was expecting. I forget how much I love being in school until I’m back in it, but I really love school so much, in particular having the excuse to learn something new and the structure to make sure it happens.
Well, I was kind of hoping to wait until I finished my 100 (more or less) things before writing my first post but I’m not even half done and it’s been over a week and it seems like there’s always something like this that comes up and prevents me from doing any number of things I want or need to do, so fuck it, I’ll just post anyway.
So here we are, a new blog, a new month (okay, not a new month), and a new me (okay, really just the same old me). I kind of want to just pick up where my old blog left off, with random posts about my general level of tiredness and my job and what fruit I recently purchased, but at the same time, given that this is a whole new blog, I sort of feel the need to write something introductory. Perhaps just a summary of the state of affairs at this very moment? Okay, let’s go with that.
At this very moment I am tired. It feels like I’ve been tired for weeks and weeks, and probably that’s true. I’ve been sleeping terribly, unable to fall asleep and unable to stay asleep. Luckily being completely exhausted smooths down my temper and gently lays me down in a bed of calm serenity. It would really suck if being exhausted made me bitchier and more impatient and more likely to yell and less likely to keep my house clean or keep up with rest of my life.
I think it’s just a downward cycle that will maybe start spiraling back upwards soon. Or at least I hope that’s the case. Really, there are a number of things contributing to it, and really, I should probably spend some time thinking about ways to resolve these problems. But really, in all likeliness it will take every bit of my motivation just to get my dishes and laundry done this weekend, so that may not leave much time for any sort of problem resolution. I kind of think if I could just get my house clean, really clean, then I’d feel much, much better, but it’s so dirty and grimy and messy that even merely thinking about the work it would take to get it clean is entirely too exhausting.
You know, as I sit here lost in thought between each paragraph I type, I’m thinking that I really should spend some time this weekend figuring shit out, figuring out what I can do to get rid of the cracker crumbs and dirt that I’m finding in this bed I’ve made and am now lying in. Often my solution for feeling stressed out and overwhelmed is to make a(n almost entirely useless and mostly ignored) to do list, but maybe this time I’ll try something different. I’m not sure what though. Well…maybe it will come to me during my insomnia witching hours, my brain certainly races along at those times.
