Who Needs It Anyway!

Sleep has never come to me in a particularly easy fashion, and if you've been reading 0ddness for any length of time, you will realise that I am an insomniac on a grand scale.

Since having my meds changed, I was kinda-sorta hoping that sleep would just "happen" and that all my woes would come to an end, but despite the patches working better than the tablets, sleep still eludes me.

We can go to bed at any time - usually, if Kellie has work, then we're in bed at a reasonable time, anything between ten and eleven. If there is no work on the cards, then we can still be up past midnight. These times are - to me - reasonable.

However. Regardless of going to bed at 10pm or 1am, the same thing happens. I lay there. Some nights I'll go to bed and read, some nights I'll go to bed and be so damn exhausted, I'll just flop onto my side of the bed, and other nights, I might potter around on my phone... Catching up on Facebook or Twitter, maybe play a game for a little while.

Then I'll get bored, be distracted by my exhaustion and start to settle down. During this time, I adjust my pillows, the duvet, how I am laying, how Kellie is laying, decide if I am hot or cold, fidget around and generally screw around trying to get just "so" in order to sleep.

Conversely, Kellie will lay down, close her eyes, and can start to snore within minutes of getting into bed. She can be snoring while I am still adjusting my pillows!

Once I am in a decent-ish position in bed, I can just lay there, staring into the darkness, my mind wandering around at it's own speed, trying to figure out life's greatest mysteries... Do penguins have knees, What's the speed of dark, Do I have perfect colour-vision and it's everyone else that is wrong...

I can be laying there - and generally do - for anything from an hour to the entire night. Sometimes I doze off for an hour, then wake up - and start over trying to get comfortable. Sometimes I can sleep for a couple of hours here and there...

Eventually, tiredness wins out, and I usually fall asleep between five and six in the morning - usually within the time-frame of "Time for the house to start waking up!" and I have weird dreams, and am disturbed regularly.

Lately, however, things have been all over the place. After finding a couple of people peering in through a window, Kellie believes that any sound she hears in the house in the middle of the night must be a burglar. It doesn't matter that there are also anything from two to four kids in the house, not to mention two virtually-nocturnal cats... No, the sounds upstairs MUST be bad-guys getting into all our stuff.

So Super-Dan has to go and investigate. Once out of bed, my "Getting Ready For Bed" stuff has to start over from the very beginning.

Other nights, it's been Kellie vs. The Bad Dreams. Bad Dreams that involve her fidgeting and twitching and thrashing and lashing out (at me) until she wakes up, and needs to wake me up for a cuddle. A cuddle that means I've got to rearrange how I lay so she can nestle into me comfortably.

Which starts me over from the beginning.

The other night too, we had a massive thunderstorm that lasted ages. Thunder and lightning do not bother me in the slightest, and usually I am at the window or in the garden watching it. Kellie, however, does not like thunder, nor lightning. So every time there was a flash, she squeezed me. Every time there was a clap of thunder, she jolted. And needed a cuddle.

See Bad Dreams to see how THAT goes.

And, of course, with Burglars, or The Bad Dreams, or The Massive Thunderstorms, Kellie can't go upstairs on her own to have a wee. So Dan is shaken awake enough to escort her to the loo, wait for her outside, then escort her back down to bed. Once back in bed, I have to go through all the pre-sleep crap all over again - and, usually, decide halfway through all this, that *I* need a piss.

What doesn't help either, is usually once I get up out of bed, that's it, I am done. I do try to get back to bed and back to sleep, but it doesn't work.

We've been so so busy this last couple of weeks, my body is running on fumes before the day even starts. I feel like crap, I'm shattered, and just wish I could sleep. Hell, I wish Kellie would sleep - that'd be a good start!

I'm sitting here, it's 0630, and I've been up and about for two and a half hours. This time, because she couldn't get comfy, was too hot AND too cold, so I moved out of bed, let her settle, and then decided I couldn't be arsed to try and get back to sleep.

My mood is linked directly to my sleep levels, so you can imagine, I am a very tired, very grouchy, border-line-serial-killer... Lucky for humanity in general, I only have one child around at the moment. Jaysen & Tamsyn are at their mums this week, and Dominic is down in Devon for the entire school holiday, leaving just Molly - who is lucky, because she does make a nice cup of coffee.

Which means I will let her live.

Kellie, on the other hand, is having to work - which is both busy and stressful at the moment - but that is a post/grumble/rant for another day. She's doing overtime under the pretence that "Work is Busy" but I suspect it's actually "Dan is Tired & Grouchy, and it is Kellies Fault"

I am hoping to survive the day, and possibly try for an early night tonight... Maybe in about 14 hours or so.

Good luck humanity.

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