Broken Sleep

It's a Wednesday again, and on Wednesdays I've been writing about pets. I just can't do it today. My ability to transform memories of animals into witty, pithy, coherent stories just isn't happening. For the last three nights my sleep has been broken and my brain is functioning at a fairly low level.

So......very......tired.

My wife is occasionally asked to travel for work. It's usually only overnight, sometimes two nights, very rarely more. Notice that I'm talking about nights of travel, not days, it's nights that really matter. She's such a good mom and wife that when she gets home from work in the evening, she's right in the thick of things. The load of parenting immediately is reduced by half. It's like carrying a really heavy long piece of wood, even if you can pick it up in the middle and handle it by yourself, it's always easier if you have a buddy to grab one end while you get the other. It's lighter and easier to maneuver and you're less likely to accidentally smash it into something. My wife is my buddy, she helps with the load at the end of the day which lets me mentally relax a bit for the three hours between when she gets home and when the kids go to bed. By the time they're in bed I'm pretty chill and if you give me another hour to chat and unwind I'm ready to head off to dreamland. When she's gone though, the load is that much heavier, but more importantly, I have to be fully 'on' until I get the kids tucked in. Even if I'm tired, my brain is still churning. Calming it down and turning it off so I can go to sleep is that much harder and takes that much longer. My bedtime is later and my ability to go to sleep sucks. I go from getting 7-8 hours of sleep a night to getting 3-5. On Monday night I slept for a little over one. My brain was convinced that it had to figure out the optimal third car to buy that I could work on and autocross and still be able to keep the kids safe. Never mind the fact that by Tuesday I'd decided the whole idea was dumb, I needed to figure it out (second generation Subaru Forester if you're wondering). Once I figured it out, at about 3:00 AM, I was able to sleep only until my son woke me up at 4:00 to tell me he had a bad dream. No more sleep for me. I'm rambling here, but you get the point, no sleep. So tired. So so tired.