It’s Six AM Somewhere

It’s almost midnight.

I should be sleeping.

I went to bed two and a half hours ago.

Actually I’m still in bed, sitting in the dark with only the soft glow of my laptop for light.

I’ve been having trouble sleeping for a few days now. I remember I had a lot of sleepless nights last time I was pregnant too.

For almost  a week I’ve been waking up around 3:30 in the morning. Then of course I have to get up and use the bathroom. And when I lie back down, I can’t get back to sleep for a couple hours. I usually manage to fall back to sleep around five o’ clock. Then my son wakes me up around 6:30.

Mercifully, my son, who I though had given up naps a few months ago, is back to taking regular afternoon siestas. So I do manage an hour long nap myself in the the afternoon.

But I’m still exhausted all day. And until tonight had no trouble falling asleep at bed time.

All the advice I’ve read says to get up for awhile if you can’t sleep. So I’m blogging. Something I haven’t been doing much of lately because I’m so tired.

So what have I been up to since my last post? I realize you may not care, but writing relaxes me, which is what I”m trying do. I’m too tired to come up with something creative and witty, so humor me please.

Well, there was Christmas of course. We had a very nice Christmas. We gave little David a huge Thomas the Train set that takes up almost half of our living room. He loves it, but I kind of want my carpet back. My husband gave me a pasta maker attachment for my Kitchen aid mixer. Before you start saying appliance are terrible, unromantic gifts, it’s exactly what I wanted and asked for.

And after a frustrating tussle with the attachment and throwing out the first batch of dough, I did manage to figure out how to operate it. I’ve been making noodle dough for years, but this little thing it seems is much more particular about the consistency of the dough than my rolling pin is.

New Year’s Eve was uneventful. I’m not the stand-outside-in-a-crowd-of-people-in-freezing-temperatures-for-hours type. I’m happy to sit home on the couch. It’s all I could do to stay up until midnight really.

Question.

Where did this whole ball dropping thing come from anyway? I really don’t understand it. “It’s a whole new year of fresh starts and new possibilities. Let’s drop something. Whoohoo!” It seems anticlimactic to me. Fireworks would make more sense. Or does the Fourth of July have a monopoly on that? Am I the only one who thinks the ball is silly?

I had another pre-natal appointment in there too. Everything seems to be fine. But the nurse took my blood pressure and it was really high. And they were concerned, so the doctor took it again at the end of the appointment and it was fine. So we don’t know if it was a fluke, something serious or perhaps it had to do with the fact that I had to wait almost A FULL HOUR beyond the time of my appointment before I finally saw the doctor. At any rate, I have to go back next week so they can check again. Maybe they can tell me why I can’t sleep too.

Then what we’ve all been waiting for, in two weeks I’m having the ultrasound. Finally, we should know if it’s a boy or girl. And I get to have the 3D ultrasound. I’m excited about that. When I was pregnant with David it was still fairly new, very expensive technology, and my doctor only ordered 3D for at risk pregnancies. Now I guess it’s like those $25 DVD players at Walmart, and everyone can have one.

So if you don’t know what I’m talking about, 3D ultrasound is very cool because you can actually make out the features and details of your baby. Almost like a real picture.

Oh, we also took a trip to Chuck E. Cheese last week.

I’m telling you that place is the fifth circle of hell.

I’m sorry. It just is.

The noise, the crowds, the music that repeats on a loop every 45 minutes.

My son loves it. My husband enjoys it. Me, well, it just gives me a headache.

Oooh, so I’m tired and now I’m getting cranky. I wouldn’t write that about Chuck E. Cheese if I weren’t cranky. Not that I don’t mean it with all sincerity.

One thing to note about Chuck E. Cheese. They still play the same pop songs from the 80’s that they played when I used to go as a child to it’s former incarnation known as Showbiz Pizza.

There were a lot of crying kids at Chuck E. Cheese. We were at Disney World a few years ago, and I noticed a lot of crying there as well. It’s supposed to be the happiest place on earth, yet everywhere I looked I saw sobbing, whining, very unhappy children.

So we take our kids to these wonderful, exciting places, wear them out, over stimulate them, fill them full of junk and sugar and walk them past shelves and shelves of toys and souvenirs that we will not buy for them, and they have huge meltdowns. Who ever would have thought?

Well, I’m going to try and sleep now before I get any crankier.

You’ll have to overlook the typos. I’m too bleary-eyed to proofread. And it is kind of dark in here.