Wage Slave Hazards - Sleep

When I was an addled youth....I used to get horrible headaches.

Then one day I read in a science periodical that *getting up early all week and sleeping in on Saturday and Sunday* could cause headaches. Aha!

But I could never really avoid the cause.

I got so much school work - to the point where I was pulling 1-2 all-nighters per week - that on Friday night I could barely stay awake until 9:30pm.

Then of course I'd sleep in a little, which pushed me back late on Saturday night....and I'd sleep until 11am on Sunday, then stay up all night doing homework. And so on...

The other day some article was going around on the web calling this *social jet lag*. Check it out - here.

Notably, they link irregular sleep patterns to obesity. I don't want to argue that point, but would like to point out that wage slaves trapped in offices and burdened with tedious, un-stimulating work are also very prone to eating unhealthy food and a lack of exercise.

Distance Breeds.....?

My first wife finally made it to Naples - she rented a car and drove over from Miami today.

I hadn't seen her in 12 full days - the longest stretch I'll bet in the 12.5 years since we started dating!

So it was her first real vacation from me in ages....I'm sure IT was enjoyable.

I believe the space has been very healthy for our marriage. If familiarity breeds contempt then the corollary must hold true, no?

Recall my MIL moved out of the house recently. I am strongly considering *separate bedrooms* for me and my beloved going forward. Everyone who's tried it tells me it's been a blessing to their marriage. As a night owl, I think most importantly it would amp up my productivity a couple notches. I'm doing my best to channel Tim Ferriss here. Don't think for a moment he'd *waste his nighttime* making small talk with a woman over Law & Order...

He most certainly would not!

Nor would Rush Limbaugh.

Of course Rush is well past his first wife...

And Tim Ferriss is still thoroughly single into his mid-30s!

Another Piece In The Bad Back Puzzle?

Long-time (and clairvoyant!) readers know that I seriously injured my back 11 years ago in a freak car accident.

Whiplash was the initial diagnosis; then TOS - Thoracic Outlet Syndrome - which was most manifest in a 99% occlusion of the vein in my left arm. I suffered a gradual loss of strength in my hands to the extent that the milk carton might fall out of my hand when pouring and that I had trouble opening a beer bottle (domestic!).

Ignorant, I underwent a risky invasive surgery where they cut all sorts of stuff out of my thoracic region. It was an attempt to free up physical space around the blood vessel and whatnot. The doctor from the opposing insurance company likened the procedure I subjected myself to, to *bloodletting*, i.e. contemporary quackery.  And he was probably right.

Anyways, there was no noticeable improvement in my condition post-surgery. At the follow-up with the doctor, he actually he sent one of his minions(!) who said, "Oh, you won't be able to tell if it helped for at least a year or longer; it takes a long time for nerves to decompress...". Heck the clown may as well have been a *financial adviser* wielding that long-run BS.

Even after the surgery, physical therapists, and the doctors, emphatically told me NOT TO DO any stretching, NOT TO DO anything like yoga because that would compress my blood vessels even more.

Of course they were, and are, complete Morons as *yoga* was the only thing that ever helped my back after surgery.

While my condition at the moment is stable, I am still far from 100% strong and healthy. But I'm honestly convinced that one day, before I leave this overheated, variable-climate planet....I'll discover the magical cure and restore my back completely.

Lately I've been reading a highly regarded, technical book - Trigger Point Therapy for Low Back Pain: A Self-treatment Workbook (New Harbinger Self-Help Workbook) - to that end.

A lot of the recommended treatment, to me, came off as highly technical and time intensive. It also seems like it's geared for *practitioners* and those who have much worse symptoms than I have. Though I'm sure if I reread it with application I'll really learn a lot - enough perhaps to become the masseuse that every chick dreams of marrying! (Years ago, I once had a young lady tell me that I should really study *massage*. And she was right! A man who can massage and dance proficiently will never have to suffer loneliness.)

When I went in for my surgery in 2001, my hands were weakening and all of my back pain was up high - from the upper back through the neck.

But when I came out, I started experiencing a new *lower* back pain. I would say the pain moved but after so many years of a stiff neck I can't even tell if my upper back is better now or if I just got used to it.

Whatever, this lower back pain is far more debilitating than the upper variety and actually goes down into the top of my hiney (images upon request).

From the book I'm inferring that my issues might be centered in my quadratus lumborum - which is the hard-to-target back wall of the abdomen or something.

The book says that one thing guaranteed to aggravate this particular area is *sleeping on one's side* - which I've done my entire life.

The author INSISTS that sleeping with the knees touching, one on top of the other like this, is very bad for this quadratus lumborum or whatever it is. It also leads to a postural imbalance which I also definitely have (left shoulder high) and have had since I was a kid.

She highly recommends that side-sleepers put a (king-sized) pillow between their legs at night.

Guess what. I tried it the other night and when I woke up, I was only 20% as stiff as I normally am. This may not sound like a big deal, but generally I wake up in such rough shape that I need to spend a full hour stretching each morning before I can fully function.

I was giddy all day yesterday thinking I may have finally found something helpful. So last night I leg-straddled a pillow again and also woke up this morning feeling positively bouncy.

Now I've had false starts before. After I bought an inversion table, the first time I used it I was euphoric and thought I had found the answer. Of course I didn't.

BTW, if you sleep on your stomach or flat on your back....you should also use pillows (under your stomach and under your knees respectively) to protect your spine - click here.

Blankets are always a good idea too - particularly when your camera-wielding buddies are around.

Olympian Bed Hog!

Every third night or so my 4.18 year old Princess treks down the stairs and crawls into bed with us. She's got the night terrors or something.

Anyways, it's bad enough that she wakes us up. BUT on top of that she's a formidable bed hog belying her 30 lb stature.

She won't allow any covers. Try to pull a blanket, or even a sheet(!), over you and she'll rudely kick it away.

And she's completely all over the bed - squirming, adjusting, kicking, grabbing, etc. all night long.

Sometimes she'll latch her whole body onto my poor wife's face!

Now Mrs. C-Nut is not exactly an egalitarian when it comes to bed space and covers either.

But in the Princess she's clearly met her nemesis.

Last night my wife pushed the little illegal immigrant onto the side and in a most Hitler-esque fashion tried to annex the 25% of the bed that I normally am entitled to.

But the jostling between her and my daughter, and the collateral damage on my side was simply too much last night.

Eventually, sometime around 4:30am, I just dropped a pillow off the bed and decided it would be more comfortable to sleep on the floor, alone - with no blankets or anything else!

As you can see by the picture I took this morning, my daughter literally slept PERPENDICULAR. And you can see the damage she wrought on the linens.

See also:

Midnight Warfare

To Jail Or Not To Jail?

On Child Incarceration

Inception - A Snoozer!

Three weeks ago, I mentioned in - A Rare Good Flick? - that all the hype surrounding Inception may actually get me out to the theater, something I do only about once every two years or so.

So on a semi-vacation up in Massachusetts this week, with my kids completely outsourced to their grandparents, I did in fact go to see it.

But I fell asleep in the beginning!

Either it was too slow, or I'm just too much of a Napper now. It was so painful fighting to stay awake that I strongly contemplated walking out right off the bat.

I estimate that I missed 15 minutes before mustering up enough consciousness to see if the motion picture lived up to the hype.

I would say that - IT DID NOT.

It wasn't bad by any stretch, but it's clearly overrated - in the category of Gladiator, Old School, and tons of others that have dashed my hopes over the past 1.5 decades.

You see, I loved the movies as a kids.  Nothing was more magical than seeing E.T., Top Gun, Star Wars, Red Dawn, Beaches, and sundry other 80s flicks.  I continually yearn for that same feeling as a movie-going adult but it remains extremely elusive.

Officially A *Napper*!

One of the (many) things I've vowed to make a staple of our homeschooling curriculum and yet backslid on was reading to the kids. Now my wife has usually shouldered most of the reading at night with the kids, but I discovered the Charlotte Mason method - see my post - and set out to become more active. Yeah, even though my son is long since literate, it's important to read to him every day because through narration, he can learn better enunciation, pronunciation, and I can stop and explain anything that's not understood.

But I haven't done such a good job at keeping this particular vow.

Why not? Well, I can't stay awake!

I've turned into the *napper*, the 'old coot' that I successfully mocked for years on Rich Karlgaard's blog. I've unfortunately turned into my father(!) who used to nod off in church, at the dinner table, or wherever he sat down. My brother and I got a huge kick out of putting potato chips on his open mouth while he watched color TV black and white Nostalgia Channel shows through his eyelids.

But now I've transformed into that very same person. I sleep 4-5 hours a night no problem (like my father); but the second I stop moving, thinking, and doing....I drift off.

I started reading the first Harry Potter book to the Prince today and I must have nodded off 17 times in the 17 pages I made it through. My son kept screaming in my ear to "WAKE UP!". He's also taken to flicking me on the head!

It's going to be a long 300 pages...

Check Tonsils Before Ferberizing

Roughly 2 years ago, when she was just 2, we put our precious Princess in a *big girl* bed and threw her binkies (pacifiers) in the garbage. Ever since then she has been a horrible sleeper. Sure, there's the expected adjustment to being mobile and out of a crib but it was more than that. My wife, of course in typical female-hindsight fashion, lamented that we took away the binky too soon.

My daughter not only kept waking up at night - she'd wake up screaming her head off and/or she'd make her way down to our bedroom - perhaps 2 out of every 3 nights. It got so bad that we turned the door-knob around on her bedroom and started locking her in her room! See - On Child Incarceration - for the start of this saga.

Though we didn't actually lock her in for more than a handful of times. We used it mostly as a threat, that if she got out of bed one more time that night we'd lock her in. This worked but only to a small extent. Over time we've grown used to her climbing into our bed in the wee hours - after all she's as cute as a button, still only 29 pounds, and a great snuggler. Plus her *night terrors* are pretty scary. She'll sit up in bed screaming - even when sleeping between me and her mother - and we all but have to slap her silly to wake her up. So given all that, what's a loving parent going to do but slide over in the bed and make room?

But help may be on the way...

A few weeks ago, while at the pediatric dentist the hygienist there informed me that my Princess had *extremely large tonsils* and that they were *almost touching*.

So, what does that mean? They should come out, right?

Well, apparently tonsils this big often cause severe sleep problems as they retard proper respiration at night - they induce some sort of *sleep apnea*. Hmmmm...

I mentioned this potential insight to a local *mom* who told me her daughter had the same sleep problems until enlarged tonsils were fingered as the culprit and removed. Her daughter, post-surgery, instantly started sleeping like a baby.

Then yesterday I found this precise affliction listed in some *baby/toddler* sleep book so I'm pretty confident, and hopeful, that simply removing our angel's tonsils will restore peace to EVERYONE's sleep schedule.

Now I don't need much sleep, nor am I much of a through-the-night-sleeper myself, but I was up with my daughter probably 6 times on Saturday night. It's been a long last two years - actually a long 5.5 years since that's when her brother arrived!

See also - To Jail Or Not To Jail?

In The Event Of A Bio-Chemical Attack...

It's about time us MEN had some nocturnal protection!

Now if only they can invent an insulated blanket capable of pacifying Midnight Warfare.

BTW, was that ad real? I couldn't tell.

Thanks to my cousin for this one.

Parental 'Old Coot' Clatter

I remember as a kid, one of the most irritating noises I heard was the clatter of my father doing dishes at dawn. In the middle of my precious REM sleep, he's thoughtlessly banging pots, pans, and plates from the night before! Sound really travels in a cold 1,100 square foot house.

I even remember one of my college buddies lambasting his mother for the same. The snot-nosed ingrate would spend the morning playing golf and then come home and take a nap in front of the television. But he'd often wake in a fit of anger, also directed at his mother for clanging dishes. What a b1tch, you know, that woman that cooked, cleaned, laundered, and subsidized the entire livelihood of *Sleeping Beauty*!

But here I am now, married and harried by two small children. Sleeping less and less as I age, I'm often up and about in the wee hours.

And I can't tell you how tempting it is to wash whatever leftover dishes I have, dry them, and put them and the clean ones from the dishwasher away!

Us parents have to take advantage of our scant free time, of our windows of opportunity. You 'young coots' will understand, one day.

See also - Dirty Dishes.

Midnight Warfare

This is what my wife does.

She goes to bed *overdressed* - with flannels and once in a while even socks!

Consequently, she's sweating right from the get-go; and then all night long she's throwing the covers all onto my side. Then I'm over-covered, and have to ventilate by periodically dangling my leg off the edge.

BUT, in the morning, she's freezing. She gets pissed AT ME for cover theft, grabs the blankets with two hands, and not only pulls them hard, she performs a *rollover and pin* to punctuate her rage. The *pin* prevents any re-acquisition.

And there I lay in my naked glory, completely uncovered and freezing my unvasectomized stones off!

Now being a little hot or a little cold at night....I can handle that.

BUT the self-oblivious, belligerent accusations that I *stole* the covers....that might very well one day drive me to a divorce attorney!

Or, minimally, I might round-up all those flannel PJs of hers and set them ablaze.



Twin beds....not a bad idea!

Inverted Humor

Deer Camp

The guys were all at deer camp. They had to bunk two to a room, but no one wanted to room with Daryl because he snored so badly.

They decided it wasn't fair to make one of them stay with him the whole time, so they voted to take turns.

The first guy slept in Daryl's cabin and came to breakfast the next morning with his hair a mess and his eyes all bloodshot.

The other guys said, "Man, what happened to you?"

"Daryl snored so loudly, I just sat up and watched him all night."

The next night it was Frank's turn. In the morning, same thing: hair standing up, eyes all blood-shot.

"Man, what happened to you? You look awful!"

"That Daryl shakes the roof. I sat up and watched him all night."

The third night was Bubba's turn. Bubba was a big burly ex-football player - a man's man.

The next morning he came to breakfast, bright eyed and bushy tailed. "Good morning," he said.

The others couldn't believe it! "Man, what happened?"

He said, "Well, we got ready for bed. I went and tucked Daryl in and kissed him good night. He sat up and watched me all night."

To Jail Or Not To Jail?

It was 1.333 years ago that we *turned the knob around* on our daughter's bedroom door. Recall she kept getting up, all night long. This way we could lock the scofflaw in, if necessary.

Though nearly 3.5 years old, the Princess still makes late night visits to our bedroom - usually around 2:41am or so, probably every other day. You see, at 12:30am, or even 1:30am....I'd have the energy and will power to pick her up and carry her back through the freezing house (I sleep in the buff!) and all the way up to her room.

But at 2:41am, my wife and I figure we can share the bed with her for another 2 hours and 19 minutes or so, until Mrs. C-Nut vacates her bed real estate; or I do on golf days. The sneaky little girl knows darn well our time threshold!

We haven't locked the Princess in her room in some time now. I've kind of rethought the whole thing. My daughter has those night terrors. She wakes up screaming and inconsolable. I just about have to slap her little face to wake her up and out of it. I've come to see the locking in as somewhat cruel - even though we only exercised the option a handful of times. Our daughter is, after all, still a *child*.

Plus I've been reading all that *attachment parenting* propaganda....

Okay we won't go there, not now anyway.



On a side note, one *attachment parent* I know told me that she's been having a hard time relating to some of her South Shore neighbors. While she breast-fed hers through age 3, and I presume has nothing against a little *family bed* time....she's not feeling so compatible with her peers who are, "Ferberizing their kids." These two parenting methods truly are in utter and complete opposition! (Ferberizing is essentially letting the kids scream their heads off, and thus no different than locking them in their rooms, etc.)

So why is this subject getting rehashed here?

Well, a friend of ours, a *detachment* parent of twins(!), just told me that, after putting locks on the outside of her kids' doors....that HER MOTHER threatened to call *social services*!

Now just because I've personally decided against incarcerating my nocturnal daughter, that doesn't mean that I'm about to wax judgmental on others who do so.

To report your own daughter for something like this...

That's pretty bad. And grounds for eventually sending the 'old bag' grandmother to one of those really inexpensive nursing homes far, far away.

See the pretext - On Child Incarceration.

And for a wee bit on *attachment* theories, see - Complete Book Review - Hold On To Your Kids

Indian Nightmare

We all have recurring nightmares and frustration dreams.

The one that hit me last night, yet again, is this:

I'm en route to some wedding in India. At the airport, or on the airplane, EVERY SINGLE TIME, I realize that I am without my passport or something.

So here I am, unable to run back and get it....OR, on a 17 hour (?) flight to a foreign country that's going to make me linger in a customs office or whatnot until my return trip!

That's where I wake up in a heated sweat.

This frustration dream has been torturing me literally for years.

I can't effin shake it!

Now, I've never been anywhere near India and I only have one good Indian friend these days - and he got married in Puerto Rico.

So where the heck is this coming from?

By the way, I still had those *didn't study for a test*, *didn't show up for a class all semester*, and *miscounted the number of credits I need to graduate* frustration dreams for a good ten years after I was released from factory schooling.