I have been having dreams about babies again, after a long time of no dreams about babies. Generally the baby is just sort of THERE, pleasantly: I’m neither responsible for the baby nor not-responsible for it. Sometimes I carry it around with me for awhile or help it out with something. The baby is not in any distress or trouble, and it’s not a stressful dream element, and I wake up with happy residual dream-feelings. (I am glad to note I no longer wake up feeling sad that the baby isn’t real/mine.) I am interested to know if you dream about babies.
I am so tired of waking up about an hour before I have to get up, needing to pee badly enough that I can’t be comfortable (but SOMETIMES can get back to sleep anyway), but knowing that if I get up and go to the bathroom I won’t then be able to get back to sleep. I’m so tired of it! This morning I woke up an hour before I had to get up, and then I lay there for 45 minutes thinking stressful thoughts one after another before finally just getting up for the day. It happens often enough that I have considered setting an alarm for, say, 2:00 in the morning, and getting up to go to the bathroom then. But I’m worried that then I would be awake from 2:00 onward. I’ve tried drinking less in the evenings but it seems almost unconnected: there was one evening recently I had nothing to drink after dinnertime, and then woke up THREE TIMES in the night to pee. Or sometimes it’s BETTER to have a nice big drink of water in the evening, because then I wake up at 1:30 to pee and then sleep the rest of the night! Sorry for saying “pee” so much.
In “there is no pleasing me” news, this weekend I was so sad and sulky about a college-visiting road trip formerly planned for later this week but rescheduled for the end of the month. I said to Paul, “I want to be going on a road trip THIS WEEK, not in two weeks! I want to be getting ready for a road trip RIGHT NOW.” There was heavy sighing, and a feeling that life was insufficiently fun. Then the road trip got rescheduled again, so that it IS later this week. And am I happy now, now that I got exactly what I wanted? No. I’m anxious about the rescheduling, and feeling like I DID want to go on a road trip but got over it and now I don’t want to and won’t enjoy it and it’ll be wasted and afterward I’ll be sorry I didn’t appreciate it more. UGGGG WHY.
Similarly: I bought this folding bookshelf recently, mainly because it was the only one I could find that would fit under the deep 36-inch-high windowsill of my personal sunporch room:
(image from Amazon.com)
I’m really happy with it, even though the top shelf is weirdly too short for any books to stand upright, and the other two shelves are taller than they need to be and so it seems as if this could have been designed more practically. STILL. I love the color (I got the cherry), I love the look of it, and it fits so perfectly in the room it almost looks like a built-in. There’s room for a second set of shelves if I want it, and I’ve been dithering: the shelves were $100, which is a lot of money if I’m not SURE I want them. Then they dropped to $88. Still I did not buy them. Then suddenly they were no longer available (I didn’t see any warnings like “Only 3 left in stock”—they were just “no longer available”) and I was kicking myself. Why didn’t I buy them?? They were only $88! They were the only shelves that fit under that sill! Now I’ll never be able to get them and I will be sorry forever! Then they came back into stock and I have not bought them because I’m not sure I need a second set and just because they’ve gone down in price doesn’t mean they’re not still kind of expensive for something I’m not sure I want.
Oh, there is a ladybug crawling across my desk! That seems good! On the other hand, yesterday I was putting things in the car and I saw a medium-sized spider skitter under the seat. So that’s in my future at some surprising moment.
I am the exact same way with the peeing. It is SO FRUSTRATING. This morning I woke up 45 minutes before my alarm to pee and of course could not fall back to sleep. But did I happily leap up to do many of the things I could do with an extra 45 minutes in my day? No! Instead I berated myself for a dumb costly mistake and then fretted about a friend going through Sad Things and then looked at my phone until well after my alarm went off because I peevishly don’t want to get out of bed after being ROBBED of 45 minutes of sleep. This happens SO OFTEN and I am with you, none of the possible solutions work!
Have a wonderful road trip – I bet it will be very fun indeed, even if the anticipatory fun has been spoiled a bit.
OK. You sucked me in with your naming blog, and now you have written that last paragraph, sneakily slipped under my defences and become my favourite Person on the Internet (and that from someone who quite likes spiders, really/.
Waking up too early seems to be a midlife thing. I wonder if we’re just more sensitive to the daily rhythm of the hormones that prepare us to start the day once estrogen is in flux? But like you, I can’t get back to sleep with bladder pressure. It’s a crap shoot whether I can get back to sleep, but it’s definitely harder when I’m more rested from having gone to bed on time. There really is no win in this situation, because getting overtired to be able to go back to sleep is not optimal, not at all.
I loathe not being able to get things to go the way I think they need to. The shifting road trip schedule would make me crazy. With the bookcase, I think I might empty and set the one I own in the spot where I would put the second one, and live with it for a couple of days to see if it feels like belongs there.
I dream about babies a lot, but that is probably because I am currently living with/raising one. I was CONVINCED she was going to be a boy, and she is still a boy in my dreams about half the time. Very odd. When she was a newborn, my wife and I would have panicky, mostly asleep moments of anxiety that she somehow got out of her crib in our room and was tangled up somewhere in the sheets of our bed. Mercifully, that has mostly stopped happening.
On the plus side, I never wake up an hour before my alarm having to pee because I have been up with the baby at least once during the night and went to the bathroom then. So, in a way, that’s super convenient…
My youngest kid is nine and I occasionally have dreams that I’m pregnant or have a newborn. I also have dreams where I’m nursing a baby. Generally these dreams make me feel panicky and I wake up worried that I actually am pregnant which would not be a thrilling life change at this point in my life.
(We are recent first time cat owners and I spend much of the day talking baby talk to the cat and carrying him around like an infant. And come to think of it I don’t believe I’ve had any baby dreams since! Clearly the kitty boy is fulfilling all my subconscious baby-mothering instincts.)
I haven’t dreamed about babies, or at least not memorably.
I, too, have the full bladder just a tad too early to get up problem. I agree it’s better when you drink a big glass of water before bed and, thus, wake up at 1:30 to pee.
As an inveterate book person, I say buy the book shelf.
Your last two sentences exemplify why I want to drag a publisher to your front door and make them give you a book deal.
My (only child) daughter is nine, and I can’t think of the last time I dreamt about a baby. I definitely had dreams about babies before she was born, and when she was tiny I would dream that she was in the bed with me and about to smother under the duvet, even though she only slept in her own crib with no duvet in sight. So that was fun, but those anxieties seem to have largely passed.
The last two sentences are so perfect I want to have them cross-stitched.
Dreaming the baby is smothering in my bed when, in reality, she only ever slept in her crib? Yes! Been there. Good times.
Also, you should just get the second set of shelves. Do it now.
I woke up all the all the all the time when I was perimenopausal. Now it’s more of a crapshoot: some nights I go to sleep and stay asleep, otherwise I do wake up and it’s hard to know if I’ll get back to sleep if my bladder is empty and my mouth is not dry, or if I have had my Allotted Sleep for the night and will nod out midafternoon (not enough to be restorative, but clearly and embarrassingly out).
I say drink as much as you can from dinnertime on, because occasionally I will wake up to pee a couple of hours after I have done to bed, and and I am delighted to know that I will definitely need to get up and definitely will fall back asleep. This approach strongly resembles the way we used to get one particular child up to pee when we were on our way to bed, because otherwise he was 75% sure to wet the bed around 4 AM.
Also, when I say “drink as much as you can,” I mean water. If all we’re talking about is sleep management.
Also, my husband was supposed to take a kid on a college tour this week. I had big plans for surprise home improvements, fun outings with the remaining child, and possible moments of self-indulgence. Then spouse got a Man Illness and was going to bag, ruining my plans. So — because someone needed to take Honey Badger and because I was going to model what Sucking It Up Like Adults Do, I packed a suitcase and downloaded audiobooks and got ready to be the college tour parent. AND THEN my husband decided he could do it after all. I was happy about this change back to the original plan, but if he comes home and does not gush about (or even notice) everything I’ve accomplished, I will have some thoughts. Some strong, strong opinions.
I was supposed to take my son on college visits, too, but left the planning too late and all the tours were booked. I AM A BAD MOMMY.
Well, you’re in Mommy Jail forever now, but I once waited until too late, then e-mailed to ask if they ever had cancellations, and they said, Oh, just come along, we’ll add you to the list.
That’s probably not the case at your precious child’s dream school, the only place they could ever be happy, but for the rest of us, handy to know!
(Meanwhile, back at home, I have hung so many pictures I now have a favorite type of picture hook.)
You can’t just profess to have a favourite type of picture hook and not share what it is!
OOK, baby, OOK!
http://picturehangers.ooks.com/category/professional-hanging-line
Also, I am embarrassed to admit that I didn’t realize this right away, but if you use the tremor/kid safe hooks and need to remove a picture, the springy/flap thing swivels away. You don’t have to squeeze behind the picture to press it down while sliding the picture wire out.
THE PEE/SLEEP STRUGGLE IS REAL. Perimenopause can SUCK IT.
I second this!!!
3:30 AM this morning, and it was preceded by a “being chased by tigers in a dark woods” dream. Thanks, brain!
In the no pleasing you category, THAT IS SO ME!
For the roadtrip, I think it’s the female mental load thing. You had a mental plan of how things were going to go. Then it was undone. So, you mentally reorganized the entire thing (while complaining, is fair.). Then, when you have done that, the whole thing goes tits up AGAIN and you have to go through all the mental reorganization AGAIN. It’s two separate, but related, disruptions.
On the bookcase…yeah. I get that too. I can be a “want what I can’t have” person. So, you are not alone.
In the bug department, our upstairs bath has been infested with lady bugs (although I suspect they are the Asian invasive kind) for YEARS. Which affects me not at all but bothers my husband immensely. Honestly, I came home to a kitchen INFESTED with pantry months last summer to which he responded “Oh, I didn’t know where they were coming from.” BLOODY EVERYTHING IN THE CABINETS, DUDE. It took 5 seconds for me to figure out we were infested. But, stray ladybugs MUST BE KILLED. Anyway, lately they seem to come with the occasional wasp – what is that about? No one invited you, wasps! And, just like one-offs. We had one or two all last spring/summer/fall and have had one the other day.
To continue in the husband complaining department, he will also use the expensive, organic, apple cider vinegar to make fruit fly traps but still DOES NOTHING when there are literal larvae CRAWLING THROUGH EVERYTHING IN THE CABINETS AND THE MOTHS ARE FLYING AROUND THE KITCHEN LIKE FRUIT FLIES (as in there are like 15 – 20 of them) BUT BIGGER. It was so infested. And we still have them, although most of the cabinet items have been put into airtight containers. I am dreading going through the last few things to find if they’re wiggling (they’re probably wiggling).
My parents had a moth infestation that just wouldn’t go away, and eventually found them:
– behind the cabinets (yes, my dad actually ended up taking some of them down)
– in the small holes inside the cabinets that are meant for the thingies that hold the boards up at various heights
– in the hole in the ceiling where the light hangs off of. In Germany, the walls and ceilings are typically wallpapered, and the moth maggots apparently can live off of the paste used to put it up (contains starch). That was also the last spot they needed to find to actually get rid of them.
Good luck to you with getting rid of them! I’d get to those last things sooner rather than later so new ones don’t move to previously cleaned spaces. Disgusting little buggers.
We once had German cockroaches infest our dishwasher so thoroughly (they were inside the door) that we had to throw it out. And this still wasn’t as disturbing as the time I took a plastic jar of almonds off our shelf that I could have sworn we’d never even opened – lid was screwed on completely – to discover that it had basically become a moth larva city. And had likely been that way for WEEKS. Shuuuuddddder.
My husband gets really blase about ants, which fine, I get that they are small and don’t do much damage. But they get to multitudes SO. FAST. Could you at least sweep up the food that they are clustering around? Grrrr.
I don’t dream of babies, nor did I ever. No fair! I think I might LIKE to dream of babies! I wonder if it’s because you’re still engaged with the baby phase on the baby-name blog?
I am so with you on the nighttime waking situation. Argh.
Buy the bookshelf. Surely in your new house of many rooms you could find someplace to put it, even if not in your sunroom? :)
I’ve been waking up at night, but I think it’s because I need a new mattress. So much research, ugh.
In terms of dreams I remember, I don’t often dream about babies (though I think I do sometimes), but I do dream about being pregnant again and feeling the baby squirming around in my belly. Often I get to poke or rub a spot and feel the baby react by moving visibly, with the bulge shifting and pointy-ish corners appearing where presumably a body part is. It’s super-fun as it’s one of my favourite memories of pregnancy. I do wonder if perhaps I’ve got gas or small cramps moving around my intestines as I sleep on these nights, and my sleeping brain incorporates it into my dreams this way, kind of like having to pee and then dreaming about an endless search for a bathroom. If so: win! I’d rather have delightful pregnancy dreams than be woken up by stomach gurgling.
Oh, when I do dream of being pregnant with/having another baby, that baby is often inexplicably a girl named Olive, which isn’t a name I’d actually give a girl of mine in real life. Not that it’s a bad name at all; it’s just not one I’d pick.
I cannot recall ever dreaming about babies. However, one of our cats died a few months ago. I have been dreaming about him since then. It’s always a variation of the same dream. I am out somewhere, and I see him. I pick him up, and he feels exactly how he felt (if you have multiple cats, you know that they all feel different). I look at him and ask him how he got out and bring him home. Then I wake up and am distressed. I hate that dream.
In a fantasy world, Paul would read your entry and order the bookcase for you. In a reality-based world, you should just order it.
I am actually laughing at everyone complaining about perimenopause. Compared to the real thing, it’s a fun day at the beach.
I was talking to my husband while driving home the other day (on bluetooth through the car) and at the precise moment I had to drive around a steep curve on a freeway on-ramp, a large-ish very icky spider crawled across my dashboard and I almost crashed the car. It was not a fun moment for my husband to listen to. I learned that one cannot continue driving on a sharp curve with one hand while trying to squash a spider with a receipt with the other hand. In the end the spider fell to the floor and I got to worry the rest of the way home that it was crawling up my pant leg or into my shoe. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I rarely remember dreams at all. The only time I do remember dreaming about babies was when I was pregnant.
The getting up in the night to pee – I am sorry to say, seems to be “thing” that happens as you age. It’s a stupid.
Your waffling on the bookcase sounds EXACTLY the way I waffle on such purchases. So, even though I know that if this were me I’d still be on the fence about it; since it’s not I will tell you to buy the bookcase. Particularly if it’s only $88. If you are like me you will quickly fill up both bookcases.
I think you should get the bookcase. Also, when I was a child, I had a bed-wetting problem. My parents bought a mat that went under my sheet and an alarm went off when wet (it was from Sears). It cured me quite quickly and I can hold my pee for 15 hours. at least. and I am 60 years old. There will be no alarms going off in my dreams.
I do have dreams about baies sometimes but I think that is because I babysit during the school day. So that’s cheating.
I have panicked about things not being available anymore, so I say that was your signal to buy it.
Do NOT get me started on the peeing at night. I hate layibg there debating if I shoukd just get up and accomplish something. Like should I just workout now? Curly just danced at World Championships of Irish dancing on Sunday. I woke to pee at 2:30 am. Never went back to sleep. Torture.
If the bookcase looks built for the space, and the second bookcase will fit a similar space and look both matching and built in, for goodness sake, buy the second one! Even if you find a more perfect bookcase later, it will bug you that it doesn’t match the first one.
I’ve found that the closer I get to my period starting every month, the worse I sleep. Then after my period starts, I sleep better, but I have to get up and pee in the night several times. I think it’s my body getting rid of retained water.
Falling under both the baby dreams and can’t please me categories:
I have always really wanted a daughter and knew we would most likely be having only 1 child, but when I was pregnant I kept having dreams that the baby was a boy. So I became convinced that it was a boy and began preparing myself for this outcome. But when I had my ultrasound, to my great surprise, they were able to easily see that it was a girl!! However, when we were in the car afterward, also to my own great surprise and his, I cried (sad tears) to my husband, because I had been so sure that it was a boy!
Poor confused husband: But you really wanted a girl!
Me, tearfully: I know, and I do! But I THOUGHT it was a boy!
Order that bookshelf and tell Paul and the kids that you took care of your own Mother’s Day gift for the year!
Years ago, I remember my grandma saying how she envied how much we could sleep, that she rarely slept more than 4 hours a night. Now that I am in my late 50’s, I think it is already happening to me! I can sleep about 6 hours, with multiple wake ups-having to pee, the cat deciding my stomach would make an excellent trampoline, the runway construction at our airport that has shifted all air traffic in a path directly over our house.
I just got back from a great trip with my sister, and it confirmed to me that I am a very linear thinker. We have a plan, we stick to the plan. She is much more spontaneous, and that forces me to be more flexible, which is a good thing. My strengths are planning the backbone of the trip-finding and reserving hotel rooms, getting any tickets we might need, finding car rentals. When something is planned, it really does bug me to change that plan at the last minute-but one of my personal fears is becoming rigid the older I get, so I try to graciously go with the flow. Whether or not I succeeded, I’m not sure!!
I almost never dream about babies, which is both a little sad and a relief. I’m still not sure we made the right decision in stopping at two but there are myriad reasons why it doesn’t make sense at this point to try for another (plus I think we might HAVE made the right decision in stopping at two). So if I dreamed about them all the time, I think it would be distressing. Once or twice in the last year or so, I’ve dreamed about caring for a baby that I wasn’t sure was mine or not in that pleasant, the-baby-is-just-there way you describe. But it didn’t have the “real” feeling a dream about, say, being pregnant or breast-feeding might have.
You should buy the shelves. And put a sticky trap in your car for the spider.
And yes, getting older ruins sleep. Sigh.