Hello darkness, my old friend

Simon & Garfunkel, anyone?

Wow. It's been a really long time since I've written a blog post in the middle of the night. But here it is, 3am on the night before 2 of my kiddos go back to school and I am awake. No Diet Coke to blame. Just back-to-school excitement/jitters. Oh and a really irritating tickle in the back of my throat that keeps me coughing.

Thanks
Thank you all for your support regarding my Grandma's death. Her funeral was Monday and I have to say, it was a good day. It was sad to say goodbye, for sure. But I have no doubt she is in heaven and I will see her again. She was almost 89 years old. She had a long and happy life and a peaceful death. What more can you ask for?

Getting to spend 2 days with my extended family was such food for the soul. It really reinforced for me what a blessing it is to be part of this "empire" (as my cousin Carrie put it) that my grandparents created.

More thoughts on death and the celebration of life at another time.

School
School starts today for Annie and Charlie. This year, Charlie will be going to a new school -- the public middle school. He is excited -- and a little nervous. Even though I'm the one who dragged her feet about making this decision, I'm excited for him too. I really think he's going to flourish. I also hope he figures out how to make it to his locker on time. It's about three counties over from the front door. Man, that place is BIG!

Reality
I took this week off of work so I could get everyone back to school (Robbie goes tomorrow) and maybe catch up on some things that have been neglected around here. Such a dreamer, I am. This is how the week is really shaping up:

Monday - Funeral
Tuesday - Dentist (Like the people, hate the process. I'd much rather just go to lunch with them.)
Wednesday - Two kids to school, one kid for a final summer's hurrah, slight window for productivity
Thursday - Doctor's appt and a date with 2 bottles of heavy duty colon cleansing
Friday - Colonoscopy

Yep. I think I might need another week off to recover.

G'night
I think there was more I wanted to say, but the fog of sleep is finally falling over me again and I don't want to miss my opportunity. If I hurry, I might be able to squeeze in another 2-1/2 hours of shut eye.

Good night, John Boy.

Just me, the dog and Chopped

Dateline 4th Frog House -- 4:29am -- I'm awake. So is the dog. We're watching Chopped on DVR. I love this show, though I've seen this episode before. They can only use grills. Not my favorite episode, but good enough for insomnia.

Actually, I'm not sure this counts as insomnia. This is more child-induced sleeplessness, as in Robbie is in my bed, taking up 3/4 of the king size mattress. So I came downstairs to sleep on the couch only to find Charlie sleeping in my spot there. Arrrgh!

Looking on the bright side, it gives me a chance to catch up on a little blogging.

The boys have 1.5 days of school left, though truthfully, I think everyone has pretty much checked out already. We usually go to school past Memorial Day, but for some reason this year it seems that we should have ended before then. Maybe because most of the public schools did.

Annie starts summer school on Wednesday. She's taking gym this session. In July, she'll be taking a math class. I'm hoping it's a good introduction to the school and she'll make some friends before school starts in August.

Speaking of Annie, now she's awake and down here, too. I might sneak up and lay down in her bed. Unlike Charlie's, which is rock hard, Annie's bed is enticingly soft and comfy.

I'm thinking we're going to have to set up some rules/guidelines for summer. I can already see chaos ruling. Kids thinking they can stay up until whenever. Kids sleeping all over the house. Kids thinking they can sleepovers every night. I'll have to enlist Mike's help in making the rules since he'll be the one enforcing them.

Speaking of Mike, he had a job interview on Friday. Please say a little prayer that he makes it to the next round. Please say a big prayer that ultimately he is offered the job.

Oh! Commercial for The Next Food Network Star. It starts tonight. I love that show! For someone who is culinarily challenged, I sure like to watch other people  cook on TV.

Ugh. The search function on this blog is not working. I just tried to find a previous post to demonstrate how bad of a cook I am and the search didn't work. I also need to work on the links at the top of the page. NOW, DON'T GO CLICKING THERE. There's nothing there yet. Add it to the to-do list.

The problem with watching Food Network in the middle of the night? Now I'm hungry! But I will not eat. Well, maybe some watermelon. That wouldn't be too bad, right?

Speaking of food, you should see our garden. It's big and leafy. I should have snapped a few pics when I was there. I'm going to have to transplant the zucchini. It's giant and overshadowing some of the peppers and something else I can't remember what it is. Maybe snow peas? My spices are doing well. So are the tomato plants. I need to get some tomato cages to support those. I can't wait until we have fresh veggies from the garden. Next year, I'll be smarter about planting some early harvest things so we don't have to wait so long for some bounty

My MIL's birthday was Friday. She would have be 69. We're doing pretty well. I found myself wishing she could have been with us to celebrate Annie's graduation. Mike's dad seems to be doing ok, too. His grandmother, however, is having a hard time with Karen being gone. She just turned 92 last week. And on Friday night, her best friend, who was 95, died. My heart just aches for her.

Chopped is just about over, so I'll wrap this up. I'm going to have a giveaway coming up soon. Chex Mix Muddy Buddies. Trust me, this is one delicious giveaway. More on that later today. For now, I'm off to find somewhere to sleep.

10 reasons I love Facebook

1. Free Scrabble, with the board set up like a real Scrabble board.
2. I can keep up with brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins who live near and far.
3. Plenty of links to funny videos and interesting news stories.
4. It adds a whole new dimension to watching sports on TV. Gotta love the corresponding FB chatter.
5. It expands the number of people who read my blog.
6. Free stuff! Lots of companies offer freebies and deals just for "liking" their pages. 
7. Near-instant answers to questions like "what should I fix for dinner" or "is tomorrow an out of uniform day at school?"
8. Wide-reaching network of people more than willing to pray for things. All I have to do is ask.
9. Speaking of asking, need a costume for a school play? A used stroller for a friend? A movie recommendation? Just ask on Facebook!
10. It makes talking to myself more socially acceptable.

1am bonus reason -- Facebook makes insomnia less lonely.

How about you? Do you love Facebook? Why or why not?

If you haven't already done so, check out the 4th Frog Facebook page.

Fa la la la la la Friday Fragments

Today's Friday Fragments (graciously hosted by Mrs. 4444s) are brought to you from the retail mecca that is Strongsville, Ohio. That can only mean one thing. It's time for the annual shopping trip with my mom, my Aunt Susie and my PaPa. We're a small group this year. Only 4 of us -- and my Uncle Howie, who uncharacteristically stuck around the the mall with us through both JC Penney's and Sears, though he did have a few things to say when my mom went back to the children's department at Penney's for the third time. I'll have more to say about the trip later, but you can read some of the updates about the trip on the 4th Frog Facebook page.

Do you have a Christmas Fairy? I do -- and it's wonderful! When I came home from working a shift at a friend's store last Sunday, Annie was out in the front yard putting lights in the bushes. I went inside to find that she had hauled the Christmas tree (sadly artificial because Charlie is allergic to pretty much every tree on earth) and put it up in the family room. Mike and I had tickets to the Colts game (thanks Mark & Shannon!) and when we returned, the tree was decorated, the stockings were hung, and the nativities were in place. Thank you Christmas Fairy!

Speaking of holiday fairies, I just came across this underappreciated oldie!

I told the kids after church last week to pick a couple of tags off the Giving Tree. Charlie, bless his heart, picked the tag of an 11-year-old boy. I was happy to see that he had chosen someone like himself (at least in gender and age). Then I looked at the wish. VIDEO GAME. Crud. That's all it said. No system identified, such as Wii or Playstation, though the odds are that this child doesn't have either, and I can't buy them one. I considered one of those plug and play games, but that assumes there is a compatible TV in house and I'm not sure that's a safe assumption. So Charlie and I went to look at some of the inexpensive handheld games at Target. Unfortunately, most of those were casino or poker themed. "Here little boy, let me help you start a gambling habit..." So I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I can't afford to go buy this kid a DS, but I also don't want him to be disappointed. I considered re-hanging the tag on the tree, but it's a little late now. I'm sure I'll figure something out, but I am open to suggestions.

The boys are going to be in the Christmas pageant at church this year. Robbie wants to be the baby Jesus. This could be interesting...

Since my insomnia has worn off, I'm headed back to bed -- click here for a post I recently wrote for Fit City on the importance of sleep. In the meantime, 'tis the season for festive fragments. Find more here. Then check out other great finds at Design it Chic for Boost My Blog Friday:

Ideas for 3 a.m.

I know it seems hard to believe, but sometimes I find myself awake in the middle of the night. 3ish in the morning seems to be my favorite witching hour. So last night, while I was awake at 3:41am, I started thinking that maybe I should make a list of things that can be done in the wee hours of the morning.

1. Pack lunches.
2. Move the stuff in the washing machine to the dryer.
3. Fold the stuff you just took out of the dryer.
4. Blog.
5. Bake chicken.
6. Catch up on DVR'd episodes of "Chopped" and "Drop Dead Diva."
7. Count how many hours of actual sleep you got and fret about how many more hours are left until you have to wake up -- again.
8. E-mail your co-workers so they can be uber-impressed with the hour at which you were up working.
9. Pray.
10. Hang out on Facebook and see which of your friends are insomniacs, too.
11. Play online Scrabble.
12. Check your work e-mail and calendar to see if you can call in "exhausted."
13. Catch up on your blog reading.
14. Check the kids' backpacks that you forgot to go through before bedtime.
15. Pay bills.
16. Initiate an amorous encounter -- unless the reason why you're awake at 3am is that there are kids sleeping in your bed, which kind of automatically kills the mood.

It seems like I'm forgetting something. I know there is at least one more thing you can do at 3am...

Oh yeah. Sleep.

It's 3am. Do you know where your chicken is?

Ok, actually right now it's 3:29am and I've been awake for 2 hours. This used to be pretty much the norm for me. (Search the word "sleep" on my blog and you'll get a surprising amount of posts that talk about how I need more sleep or how I am awake in the middle of the night.) But lately, I've been doing much better going to bed at a decent hour and actually sleeping all night.

Tonight, however, I went to bed at 9:30pm and woke up at 1:30am. I laid there for about 15 minutes and felt my leg muscles tightening up -- should have stretched before and after the treadmill last night. When I reached down to try to massage some of the aching muscles, I realized it's been a while since I'd shaved my legs. And I have to be at the gym to meet Fr. Kyle at 7am.

So I did what any insomniac would do. I got up, took a hot bath, and shaved my legs. When I was in the bathtub, I remembered that the kids have to pack their lunch for school today. And since I'm leaving for the gym before they leave for school, I got out of the tub, got dressed and went downstairs to make lunches.

Only when I got downstairs, I remembered our cupboards are pretty bare right now. But I did have some chicken drumsticks thawed it the fridge. So I decided to cook those to pack in lunch boxes. Fifty minutes at 400 degrees brings us once again to:

It's 3am. Do you know where your chicken is?

A story problem

The Question: Robbie is a 6-year-old boy who weighs 58 pounds and is 48 inches tall. His mom is a 38-year old woman who weighs X pounds, is 62 inches tall and has 95% heartburn. If Robbie climbs in his mom's bed, which is 76 inches wide, and proceeds to sleep at a 90 degree angle to the top of the bed approximately 1/3 of the way from the edge of the bed, where does that leave his mom?

The Answer: Blogging on the couch at 3:40am

Clutter-induced insomnia

It's 4:17am. I've been awake for almost two hours. I have a headache, which probably is caused by lack of sleep. And it's the reason I can't sleep.

I've watched "Miracle on 34th Street" and caught up on a few message boards that I frequent. So it's either toss up a post here or go do laundry. And since I did housework from 1am to 4pm last night, I'm giving myself a night off.

I've tried ibuprofen, caffeine, no caffeine, watching TV. Nothing seems to take away this headache and/or put me to sleep. Of course I'm probably oxygen deprived and if I would go upstairs and drag out the CPAP machine for a little forced-air-assisted sleep, that might work.

But, oh, that's right. I can't use the CPAP machine because it's next to my bed and what's ON my bed is about five loads of laundry waiting to be folded and put away. I'd move that to my floor, except what's on my floor is about 10 pairs of shoes, four rolls of wrapping paper, two baskets' worth of socks, assorted discarded outfits that weren't right for whatever occasion and a partridge in a pear tree.

Boy do I feel like a hypocrite when I tell the kids to clean their rooms. It's definitely a case of do as I say and not as I do. See this kids -- learn from my mistakes. Whatever you do, do not turn your room into a replica of the Goodwill warehouse. Trust me, you will lose sleep over it.

Nothing like a little insomnia to make a girl start airing her dirty laundry -- or her clean laundry as the case may be. I figure if I don't ever make it on the Biggest Loser, I may have a shot at one of those de-cluttering home improvement shows.

Sleep: Not enough of it to go around

It's 3:28am. I have been awake for 36 minutes. I went to bed at 12:02am. I have to be awake and getting ready to take the kids to school and head on to work at 6am. If you do the math, you'll see that there is no way I will be getting enough sleep tonight.

If you would look over my sleep patterns for the past week, you will find that I am averaging about 4.6 hours of sleep each night. And if you did a historical retrospective study (is that redundant? I don't know, I'm too tired to decide) on my life as a sleeping -- or non-sleeping, as the case may be -- person, you would find that the last time I got consistently good sleep was probably January 1999.

Some of this not enough sleep business is my own fault. I go to bed too late. I know that, but the clock seems to march double-time after the kids are in bed and the next thing I know it's knocking on midnight.

Often, I'm double-crossed by my own body. I'm awakened by heartburn; by my own internal clock nudging me out of slumber saying, "Wake up. You've gotten 3 full hours of sleep;" or, like tonight, a postnasal drip tickle in my throat that keeps forcing a cough that hurts my throat and keeps me awake.

Other times my sleep deprivation is brought on my someone else: Mike's freight train-like snore. Robbie climbing into our bed and sleeping with his feet up in my rib cage, making me feel like I'm 68-1/2 months pregnant.

I don't hop out of bed immediately when I wake up. I lay there for 20 or 30 minutes hoping for the good fortune to get back to my dreams of being on the Biggest Loser and winning a lifetime supply of Diet Coke. But more often than not, I end up here, checking e-mails and surfing the web.

And what I find taunts the sleepless me. Tonight, I opened my e-mail to find a newsletter called Risks of Insomnia, Part 1 of 8. It is happy to inform me that:

Research shows that a perpetual lack of sleep can:

• Undermine the body's ability to fight off disease
• Reduce the quality and quantity of your work
• Mimic the symptoms of impaired glucose tolerance, which can lead to diabetes and hypertension
• Hinder weight loss and/or cause weight gain
• Impair concentration
• Cause disorientation
• Slow down the body's reaction time
• Increase moodiness and irritation
• Lead to depression

7 out of 9 cannot be good. But fear not, the newsletter goes on to say that lifestyle changes including proper nutrition, stress management, and regular exercise can improve the quality and quantity of my sleep starting tonight! Why does the answer always have to be diet and exercise? Does anyone smell a conspiracy here?

Closing the e-mail and moving on to do a little surfing, I am searching for a letter I'd written to Santa that appeared in a local magazine, when my search turns up this: The Importance of ZZZZZs for Parents. Now how did that turn up in my search results? Am I going to be on Santa's naughty list of lack of quality sleep?

So now it's 3:58am and I've at least turned my sleeplessness into blog productivity. I've spent a half an hour sucking on ice to numb the tickle in my throat and I find myself closing my eyes with my fingers still on the keyboard. If I hurry, I can log another two hours before I have to get up, wake the kids for school and hear them tell me, "Mommy, I can't go to school. I'm too tired."

Tell me about it, kid.

Sleep eludes me (or vice versa)

I have a sleep disorder. Well, a few. I do have sleep apnea and have the wretched machine that goes along with it.

But that's not what I want to talk about here. The sleep disorder I have is that I don't go to sleep. Not that I can't, but I don't. It's almost 1:30am and I'm still awake. This happens probably 3-4 times a week.

I'm not afraid to go to sleep. No nightmare issues. I think it has to do with my sense that once my kids are in bed, I'm off the clock. It's all about ME time. And I get sucked in by the internet (no?!) or television or whatever. Generally not chores though...

And the next thing I know it's after midnight and I'm still awake. Then, like now, I look around and see all the things I should have been doing -- yes, chores, and then feel like I need to stay awake to finish the dishes or laundry. So that I can justify having stayed up so late.

Why don't I sleep? What is my problem? Will good sleep always elude me? Will I learn to be as disciplined about my own bedtime as am I my children's?

Think I'll have to sleep on that...