The truth. The madness. The hilarity.

It's hilarious, really. The things I do. I sometimes wonder if there's anyone out there as crazy as me. When I was pregnant with Gabby, I never slept. I know, big surprise. But insomnia is bad enough, but when you're pregnant with insomnia, you can just consider yourself on the brink of death. I was. I was desperate for some good sleep. I decided that it was the mattress. The really fancy, expensive mattress that we had just recently bought that I now hate. Too soft. I thought I liked soft. I don't. So I stole the only mattress in the house that I thought was comfortable from Chandler, gave him a different one, and put his on the floor next to my huge fancy mattress. I laid my big belly down, and slept like a baby. So guess where I slept for the duration on my pregnancy?
I had Gabby, and knew something needed to be done about my sleeping arrangements. I decided I'd put the beloved mattress on TOP of the huge fancy squishy mattress so that my bed would officially be too tall to climb in without a ladder. But maybe I'd sleep fine up there. One night of that, and I knew it wouldn't work. I could feel the squish of the fancy matress under me. Too soft. So I went to Home Depot and got a board. Seriously. Put that under my mattress on top of my mattress so as not to feel the softness of fancy mattress. Oh, no. Too hard. So I added a matress topper, doubled over, and voila. Perfection. Imagine the look on Ben's face when he saw this scene for the first time. Priceless. I'm sure he was thinking, "Wow. What did I get myself into, exactly?" He just laughed. Out loud. Then said, "Hon. You're crazy. Not kidding" And he puts up with the board giving him the occasional splinter. Ha ha. Not really.
At night, it's a production. I start by drinking just the right amount of water to wake me up once- not twice, and early enough that I'll be able to go back to sleep. I get ready for bed, and climb in. I must read a book before going to sleep. I has to be interesting, but not interesting enough to keep me awake, and almost always nonfiction. (Right now it's "Leadership and Self-Deception". I highly recommend.) I read until I am falling asleep. Sometimes it's 5 minutes, sometimes it's 2 hours. I sleep with one hard and one soft pillow under my head, and one pillow on each side of me. I have a t-shirt that is perfectly folded that I put on my head. I have a ceiling fan to cool, and another fan for white noise blowing at all times. When the lights go out, if I don't immediately fall asleep, I get back up and read. We repeat that sometimes several times. When I get up in the middle of the night, I can almost always tell if I'm going to fall back to sleep or not. If not, it's more reading until I fall back to sleep. Sometimes that doesn't happen.
So there. How's that for crazy?! So when you see me and are tempted to ask, "Are you tired?" Just assume the answer is yeah. I am. Exhausted. But it's a happy exhaustion.