Friday, September 30, 2011

Sleeping Improvements

Alright boys and girls, as many of you know I've been having sleeping trouble for years now and I mention it every so often here on my blog.  Starting last week I tried Tylenol PM for the first time and noticed only a minimal improvement.  I still laid in bed for two hours trying to fall asleep (something that I don't normally do) and I still woke up around 3 a.m. for no apparent reason (something I've done every single night since October 2009).  After that I still slept so light that a mouse taking a shit would have woken me up (I've woken up to the cat sneezing in the kitchen, pigeons flapping their wings outside the bedroom window, and Snackers' tooting in his sleep before).  BUT, I did get 6 hours of sleep instead of my usual four because I went to bed at 7:30 and fell asleep at 9 instead of the usual 11, and I did feel like the quality of sleep between 9pm and 3 am was a lot better.

But I think I've found some more creative and less Rx ways of dealing with sleep.  First of all, in an attempt to cure my sleeping troubles in January I splurged on an extremely expensive mattress and some expensive, high quality sheets, to no avail.  In July I bought new, higher quality pillows, to no avail.  But part of the problem is that my extremely expensive mattress is SO THICK that even the deepest pocket sheets I can find won't stay in place on it so every night before bed I find myself running around the bed tucking all the sheets back over the corners and pulling them down on the sides.  They rarely ever come totally off the corners because they get caught on the memory foam pillow top that's sewn into the mattress but they do bunch up under us while we're sleeping and I got sick of fixing them, so I bought some sheet suspenders on Amazon.  They sat on the dining room table for a week or two before I finally convinced Snackers to help me put them on the bed Sunday night and SHOCKER, I slept for 8 hours straight!

No shit!  It was the sheets!  I figure I must have been waking up around 3 a.m. every morning because that's about the time that the sheets slip off the mattress enough to start getting on my nerves.  Monday night, 7.5 hours!  HOLY CRAP BATMAN!!!  Tuesday night, not so good because Casper likes to climb in the bathtub in our master bathroom and chew on the faucet.  I'm not kidding, he bites the tap in the bathtub and pulls on it, then lets it go and it makes this soft thunking sound.  I think he's obsessed with sounds because I know he's not looking for water - we bought the cats a water fountain with a filtration system and aerator on it.  So last night I put about an inch of water in the bottom of the tub and plugged it.  HAHA I'm so smart!!!  Casper doesn't mind water but he's not about to jump into a puddle of cold water when Snackers or I aren't around to save him if he can't get out.  I slept like the dead last night.  It's a miracle!!!!




Food:
120 oz of water
1 cup of coffee, black
1 Healthy Choice lunch
1 tbsp peanut butter
1/2 cup of grapes
1/2 cup of blueberries
2 cups of honeydew cubes
1 ear of corn boiled w/salt
1/2 serving sunflower seeds
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Daily Caloric Intake: 757
(sorry, I just didn't have an apatite tonight)




Activity:
Playing: running around the yard playing with Vladdy during lunch
Walking: Short distances at football practice
Stressing: Elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, sweating ... all the descriptions associated with exercise so I'm sure I burned some calories tonight because I was realllllly stressed.

2 comments:

  1. Maybe he's not looking for water but rather for minerals. Maybe his diet is deficient in calcium or something? After all, you are filtering his water.

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  2. We have a bowl of simple tap water in "the cats bathroom" and then the filtration system in the kitchen so I don't think that's it. He also thunks his toes on the bottom of the bed frame, it makes a similar sound, and loves to lick plastic grocery bags for extremely long period of time if I leave one laying around. He's just a silly kitty.

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