#i usually try to sleep at 11PM and then wake up at 3:45AM but i usually end up sleeping at 1:30-2:30 instead

[mushroom-winners-proof]

Bro the fuck you're 20? I thought you were much older than me and like 26 or something what? I can't believe we're the same age. How do you find the time to draw comics at least like every other day?

i go to bed very late and wake up very early

[jonasmaurer]

A whole day, from start to finish

Hi friends! Hope you’re having a lovely morning. I’m looking forward to catching a barre class today, picking up a juicer from Facebook Marketplace (it’s the little things), and catching up on work stuff. I’d love to hear what you have going on!

For today’s post, I have an entire day from start to finish. It’s fun to write these every now and again and look at how much the chaos has evolved. (Like this one when P was a baby and Liv was a preschooler!) This was a pretty *normal* day for us right now, with a couple of exceptions: the Pilot was gone (I basically never have a clue if he’ll be around or not. Airline life is a new world, I tell ya) and the girls didn’t have any after-school activities. We’re running around doing dance classes, dance team (!), swim, and gymnastics, so this was a rare treasure when we could just chill at home after school. 

Here’s a peek into the day:

6:45am: I wake to the sound of my alarm. This is a MAGICAL thing because usually I’m already awake, from either Liv, Caro, or P (or a mixture of all of the above) waking me up at some point and my inability to go back to sleep. All three stayed asleep in their respective beds, all night, and this is worth a celebration. I squint and look at my phone with one eye open, checking emails, scrolling through Instagram, and within a couple of minutes, Livi walks in. We chat in bed and she tells me about her dreams, and we head downstairs for breakfast. On the way downstairs, I try to wake P, who is still crashed with her arms wide open. She’s usually the early bird -awake by 6 most days – so this is very surprising. 

6:55: Livi gets dressed and ready for school while I start their favorite banana-egg-oat pancakes, drink a morning detox drink, and put their lunches and snacks into their lunch boxes. I fill up water bottles, grab their vitamins (they take a kids’ multi, a probiotic, and vitamin D each day), and go back upstairs to try to wake P again. This time I’m successful, and she groggily carries her stuffed sloth downstairs to start the day.

7:20: Both kids are happily eating pancakes, so I rush upstairs to throw on a lululemon outfit + some moisturizer and brush my teeth. I make my favorite collagen coffee

(I use decaf organic coffee from Whole Foods, add a little monk fruit, and then heat up almond milk separately in the microwave. I add two tablespoons of collagen to the hot almond milk, and use my milk frother to froth it up. I pour the almond milk and collagen mixture on top of the coffee and take it with us in my beloved Yeti cup. It’s like a latte but with coffee instead of espresso with a protein boost from the collagen. It’s SO good!), do the girls’ hair while they brush their teeth, tie little shoelaces, slather sunscreen on them, and we’re out the door by 7:45.

9:10: I’m back home from both drop-offs and slam an applesauce pouch before hopping on the Peloton bike.

It’s my only chance for a quick workout, so I do a 30-minute Tabata ride and hit a new PR. This was a tough ride and I feel like I’m struggling to hit my previous PR the entire ride, but it feels awesome when I finally do it. I wash my face and get dressed quickly, and am on a conference call, drinking a smoothie by 10.

(1 cup almond milk, frozen cauliflower rice, 1/2 scoop Truvani chocolate protein powder, 2 tablespoons hemp protein, maca, 1 tablespoon chia seeds, cinnamon, blueberries, Nuttzo, and spinach. I’ve been using the Truvani protein lately and really love the ingredients, taste, and texture. It’s very sweet, so that’s why I only use half a scoop and mix it with the hemp protein.)

Supplements:

(DIM Detox -only for a couple of months – an adrenal booster, and B complex. Ali has been helping me with supplements and I love working with her.)

10:30 I’m off the conference call and get ready to head to a nearby gym for employee orientation. I’m finally going to start teaching classes more regularly, and I’m pretty excited about it! I’ve mostly been subbing classes since last summer. With the Pilot gone so often since he deployed and then catapulted straight into the airlines, it didn’t make sense for me to pay a babysitter more to watch the girls than I’d make teaching the class. So I subbed here and there, mostly barre, TRX, and spin, but I really miss having my own classes. I’m really looking forward to making my way back into the Tucson fitness community and have a couple of current options that include childcare. 

11:30 I’m back home! I make the beds, clean up the kitchen and wipe down the counters, run the eufy, start a load of wash, and drink a green juice.

I write a post for WebMD, the meat for this post, schedule social shout-outs, and send a couple of invoices.

12:40: Lunch! I made this Instant Pot soup for dinner one night and saved the rest for easy lunches. It’s one of my favorite combos: chicken, zucchini, bell pepper, sweet potato, carrot, onion, garlic, ginger, turmeric, rosemary, salt, pepper, and chicken broth. (It’s my standard recipe but I added some ginger and turmeric for this batch because I’m trying to eat as many gallbladder superfoods as possible.) I have it with a salad of spinach, cucumber, shredded beet, a squeeze of orange juice, and a dollop of vegan spinach artichoke dip from our Sunbasket delivery.

 (Not super pretty but was perfect!)

1:00 I get my nails done and pick up P! TBH I HATE sitting in the chair for 45 minutes because I get antsy, but it’s so nice to have my nails done and not worry about them for two weeks.

3:10 We’re back home from school pick-up and I make the girls a snack plate. They have one almost every day after school. It’s like a cheese board for kids: a mix of random snacky stuff for them to enjoy while they chill for a bit.

I take a little break to snuggle on the couch with them and watch some of the Les Mis 25th anniversary concert that was on PBS. Liv is surprisingly very into my G-rated version of the storyline, and after we watch Samantha Barks crush “On My Own,” I help Liv with her homework. Then both girls head outside to play for a bit.

My snack: an apple with some granola butter (obsessed with this stuff) and chocolate chips, plus a hibiscus hot tea 

The next few hours are the usual whirlwind of cleaning and cooking: switching out dishes and laundry, packing lunches, making + eating dinner, and cleaning up the dinner aftermath.

Dinner is a Sunbasket meal. We have two each week and I look forward to them because I feel like dinner only takes 15 minutes or so to prep on these nights. The girls are into shrimp, so thankfully this one is a huge hit.

The girls’ plates: 

(I give them fresh fruit with pretty much every meal, so I sliced up some apples to go with it)

my bowl:

6:45: We take the dogs for a 20-minute walk around the neighborhood. P rides her scooter, Liv walks Caro, and I walk Bell. Now that the weather has cooled down a teeny bit, we can walk the dogs more often, and they’re loving it. We figured out on our walk that Bella is going to be 14 in December!! I can’t even believe it. 

When we get home, it’s straight into the bedtime rituals: bath, books, brush teeth, story time, checking on Liv every 10 minutes until she’s crashed. In between checking on Liv, I hang out in the playroom and respond to IG DMs and emails.

9pm: Liv is asleep. I turn on Bachelor in Paradise, finish up this post, drink a golden latte, answer blog comments and any leftover emails, and crawl into bed.

11pm: Lights out and ready to do it all over again.

Some previous similar posts:

from April this year

from 2018 in Valdosta

When P was 8 months old and Liv was 4

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[mcrmadness]

This other day I was reading my old posts on a blog I used to write to in 2010-2014 aka I was 19-23 years old at the time. It’s just funny how nothing literally has changed since that. No wonder why I feel like I’m still living the 2010. All my posts to there were mainly about mental health (I was on antidepressants in 2008-2013, also on antipsychotics in 2008-2009 and another one for couple of months in 2010.) and the funniest thing was that I have had the EXACT SAME sleeping schedule talks there as I have lately had on Tumblr :DDD

I guess I need to take some notes for the neuropsychiatrist trainer cos we were talking about the scleeping schedule and she asked me why do I think my inner clock is what it is, aka the best time for me to fall asleep would be between 1-3 am and to wake up would be between 11am and 1pm. And damn, when I read these posts I didn’t even remember all this, but there as well I’ve written about how I get super tired during the morning hours and then more active towards the night again. And I was sleeping during daytime hours A LOT because I just got so tired from being so bored. Most of the time my sleeping schedule also was changing all the time, sometimes falling asleep at 11pm and waking up at 8am but ending up being super tired the whole day, and sometimes falling asleep around 5am and waking up in the afternoon. And that is ecactly how it’s been lately, too. Always changing.

She also said something about if I was to work or school, wouldn’t that force my sleeping schedule to become different? And I told her it wouldn’t, because I was to school and work for 5 years in a row and it never fixed itself. I was working 5-6 days a week every week and it never affected anything. I still went to sleep very late and had trouble staying awake, even at work I had to start doing something because I was so close to falling asleep during the morning hours.

I always say that my head wakes up only after the midday (we use 24h clock here in most parts of Europe, I never learnt if 12 at midday is 12am or 12pm, I just can’t wrap my head around it no matter how many times I’ve tried!) and before that I’m basically a zombie or in a coma or something. My eyes just stand in my head but I can’t think at all and I can’t go anything because my brains are still asleep and my body would love to go back to bed as well. But after midday, my brains are like “oh wait, good morning, I guess?” and my body is like “oh finally you decided to join in...”, and after that I’m able to do things that I need my brains to, and the closer to the night we get, the more active my brains become. And I’m at my best between 11pm and 2am basically.

She also said it might just be learnt behaviour, but I don’t really buy that. My inner clock has always been like this. Already as a baby I used to stay up late and wake up slightly before the noon, and sometimes it changed and I was waking up and falling asleep really early. And then again much later. (And I guess that’s normal for babies idk???) And I also always had trouble falling asleep during my school time, when my mom was still deciding over that. I remember so many evenings just laying in my bed, lights out and being totally awake and sometimes calling my mom that I can’t sleep. I came up with so many different things to help me fall asleep, I was basically playing, too. If it was freezing, I’d remove my blanket and pretend I was some poor kid on a street sleeping under a newspaper and someone saved me and I got a warm blanket and that’s when I covered myself with the blanket and it was soooo warm! And sometimes I liked to go under my bedsheets, under the... idk how you call that very thin mattress on top of the mattress? Anyway, under that, sometimes even under the mattress itself. And I imagined that I had been buried alive and was in a coffin. And I tried to get out, and sometimes I got so deep into that imagery that I started to panic for real, which is when I then crawled back from under the bedsheets :D I did things like these ALL THE TIME. And later on, when I got first phone with a flashlight (and camera), I was playing with it a lot. I even have some really old camera phone photos that I have taken because I was so bored while trying to sleep that I just had to do something. I also came up with all kinds of things to imagine in my head to help me fall asleep, my favorite was probably based on this old Disney Interactive game Toy Story 2 - you play with Buzz Lightyear in that and I just took that and I imagined running around my house and the yard and stuff. And sometimes I imagined a game that would be like my hometown but I could drive around in a car and destroy all the houses and buildings, and see inside of the houses etc.

I remember when I first started to stay up past the midnight, I used to write into my diary and I was always making jokes about how clock was already 1am oh my godddd and stuff like that, because it was so exciting. And then it just became a habit and it’s very rare for me to fall asleep before the midnight. It was usually always at least 1am even when I was working/studying, I had to get up at 6:45am or so but I still couldn’t make myself to go to sleep earlier than that because I needed more time to myself because my day has more than 24 hours to it. I had to sacrifice from somewhere and that was usually sleep, because I wouldn’t have been able to function if I got only like... 5-6 hours of free time/day for myself. And every night I didn’t want to go to sleep but I also was so tired I fell asleep immediately, so I was relieved to finally make it to my bed, but still 8 hours a day only for myself? That was what I got until I just HAD to go to sleep again and even that was too little time. And also, if I got enough sleep one night, that would have meant I wasn’t tired the next night and my sleeping schedule would have moved forward again about 2 hours or so -> even more tired the next morning.

But anyway, my point was: I have always been “struggling” with my sleeping schedule but it’s actually not causing myself any harm - it’s just the society that has set these opening and closing times to everything that does not meet my inner clock at all. I always have to try and adjust to those and I don’t understand why it’s always us who have to sacrifice something from us, why can’t they so something for us night owls as well? Not a 24h open store but like... some store that would be open between 11am and 3am, for example :D I anyway don’t understand this trainer because she keeps saying something about how I shouldn’t be so hars to myself and it’s not bad if people are different, but still I should try to have a sleeping schedule that wouldn’t be so fucked up? Like what do you want now? Me being me or me being something society wants? I prefer the first.