Trust Sleepy? Really?

Hey pill fans,
Sue here - We have friends coming over for dinner tonight so I'm frantically picking up the house and thanking my lucky stars we put up the trampoline last weekend. That way, the kids can jump around risking life and limb while we drink wine. Doesn't it sound like a perfect evening?

And I'm hoping that since my youngest will be at a sleepover and my 12-year-old has the sleeping patterns of a bat; I will acutally get a decent night's sleep. Which reminds me of an article I wrote recently that I'll share here.

Have an awesome Saturday night everyone. Do something fun and just a little bit irresponsible.

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Let’s Face it: Sleep is Overrated

By Sue Tabb

I used to be a fantastic sleeper. When I was a teen, I could sleep through a category four hurricane, an ear-piercing alarm, and my sister climbing over my bed, jumping out of the window onto the roof, and hopping into her boyfriend’s Camaro with the fuzzy dice. That’s some serious shut eye.

Fast forward to now: if the temperature in our bedroom drops below 68.5 degrees, a cricket chirps or one of my girls sneezes, I’m awake. Not only am I up and at ‘em, but I am in red alert mode. I am immediately vertical, adjusting thermostats and ceiling fans, checking the girls’ breathing patterns, responding to emails and writing out a grocery list.

I’m not kidding.

Right now it’s about midnight and my husband is snoring away as I write this – he doesn’t care that the closet door is ajar or that there is a load of laundry I forgot to take out of the washer that will smell like dirty feet by morning. He is peacefully resting, which makes me want to throw this pen at him; or at the very least, shuffle some papers while sighing loudly. Hey, don’t judge me, I think I am a budding insomniac with a bright future in sleeplessness and we can become quite irritable around good sleepers.

But the older I get the more I think sleep is overrated. Really, do we need eight hours of rest every single day? Who came up with that rule – Rumpelstiltskin?

I mean it seems rather arbitrary. Can’t we just make up a new formula? For example, why not determine how much sleep you need by taking your kids ages, adding them together and dividing by four? In my case, that would be 5.5 hours, a more obtainable goal. If you don’t have kids, you can stay up all night or sleep all day or do whatever the heck you want at any given moment so we – the ones with the deep circles under our eyes – are all bitterly jealous of you. Go take a nap already.

So now, when I contemplate what superpower I’d like to have (and doesn’t everyone?), I believe it would be the power to sleep anywhere, anytime, with the snap of a finger. That would beat lying in bed with the Rolodex of worries I mentally flip through each night. What if someone wakes up with a fever? What if my alarm doesn’t go off? Why didn’t I get that birthday card out that’s been sitting in my car for a week? How am I going to fit a trip to the grocery store into my day? Isn’t my car due for an oil change? Can I really trust Sleepy’s for the rest of my life?

As Charlotte Bronte once said, a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow. You can say that again Char. I don’t think there is enough Ambien on the planet to turn this creaky cranium off. And I’ve tried it all – hot showers, green tea, lavender slippers, Soduko puzzles, reading, writing and arithmetic. Okay, not arithmetic. I was never very good at that but everything else.

I want an off switch for my next birthday. That would be a cool gift. The kids are fighting, the meeting goes long - no worries – just turn yourself off. My problem is that I don’t know a living being that would opt to turn me back on. That would be the end of me.

So I will have to adjust to this new sleep pattern, namely, the just-give-up method. Rather than stare at the clock, counting down the few hours I will get of sleep each night, I have decided to embrace this new stage. You can’t get anything done when you sleep. This new pattern affords me several extra hours a day. I could learn to speak a new language or knit a blanket or watch the entire last season of Lost I have recorded. The possibilities are endless.

But you know I won’t do any of that. I will lie awake worrying about the field trip form I forgot to send in, the early morning meeting I have and whether we’ll ever know where in the world Matt Lauer is.

Then I’ll adjust the thermostat.