Insomnia

Every once and awhile, I go through a period of insomnia. I'm guessing that it happens to most everyone. It never happened to me until I had children. I had a particularly bad period in Japan a few months after Annika was born. I remember calling my mother one night in tears because I couldn't sleep and was beginning to come undone. Obviously. Annika was just a couple of months old, but she was sleeping through the night, or rather--overnight. She would wake up early. I remember going to bed every night, tossing and turning, taking two or three (sometimes four) sleeping pills to no avail, getting up to read, feeling sleepy and then as soon as the lights were off--more tossing and turning. Looking at the clock and thinking "OK, if I fall asleep now, I can still get six (five, four, three, two) hours of good sleep".

There's no reason why I'm battling insomnia right now. I mean, if there is, I can't figure out what it is. I drink two cans of pop per day. Sometimes, I drink three. I don't drink pop later than 4:30 or 5:00. On my two can day, I always finish the second can right after lunch. So, I don't think it's caffeine. I've been trying to watch my sugar intake, so I'm not cramming my maw with sugar late into the evening. The barest trace of chocolate is all I have been treating myself with.

Maybe it's the fact that the days are so long here. The sun doesn't fully go down until after 10:00 p.m. The sun comes back up at about 4:12 a.m. The birds are singing at about 3:50 a.m. We darken the room as much as we can and keep the windows closed (which is starting to be a bit suffocating). We run a big fan all night to cool us and provide white noise since there are 3,456 people living under, around, and on top of us. Josiah and Annika sleep all night, though Josiah was up to potty at 4:15 this morning for some reason. Wow, that's not irritating.

May I add that my sweet husband has been letting me sleep in every morning until 7:00 a.m? Thanks Kitten. It does help. I know I'm hard(er) to live with when I'm not getting much sleep.

I switched from Tylenol PM to Motrin PM, thinking that a different formulation might be the answer. In the past, I have developed a sort of tolerance to Tylenol PM after awhile, so I would switch over to Simply Sleep for awhile and back and forth. Tylenol PM has been such a friend to me. Anyway, the Motrin doesn't appear to be doing the trick.

I have a very definite bedtime routine of getting cleaned up, brushing teeth, checking fourteen times on the kids, then crawling into bed and reading. Back in the glorious past, when I could sleep, I'd read until about 10:30 and fall instantly to sleep. For the last three weeks, I have been reading until 10:30 like usual and then putting my book away, hoping for the best. No dice. I'll lay there and almost drift off, come awake....allllmost drift off, come back awake. I've been falling alseep sometime after midnight every night for three weeks. It's so frustrating. I wish that I could figure out what it is...

In other news: Josiah had a doctor's appointment to recheck his lump on Monday. It went fine. His doctor has referred us to a German doctor in Boblingen, a suburb of Stuttgart. The hospital we'll be going to is actually on the road to Panzer Kaserne (where our PX is), so we're very familiar with it. The German doctor will look at the bump and probably do a sonogram to try to determine what it is. We know that it is NOT cancerous, but that's about as much as we know. Josiah may have to have it removed, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Our appointment is on July 7th.

We were going to go to Rome over the 4th of July, but seeing as Josiah has this appointment on the 7th (and they didn't have another appointment until September), we have decided to go to Zell-am-See, Austria instead. For you Band of Brothers lovers out there, Zell-am-See was the last stop for the Brothers. It's close to Berchtesgaden and the Eagle's Nest. Check and check. That's right, we're taking our kids to Hitler's vacation home over the 4th. Go America!!

We're going to stay in a real, live Austrian vacation place too. I mean, versus a Holiday Inn. We're excited about that. I'm going to pack plenty of extra bedding though. We don't want a repeat of our experience in Munich, sharing two twin sized duvets and two flat pillows between the four of us!

So, unless something crazy happens between now and the weekend, I'll blog about Prague on Monday...if I'm not too tired, that is!