Our pillows suck.

Quiz: Good sleep hygiene or not?
(Guess who this is? : )

Last night was a bad night. Well, it actually started several days before when I did not get enough sleep. Then, yesterday afternoon, I accidentally took a two hour nap, which is my personal kiss of death. I had a weird dream where we were checking into a hotel in a city like Las Vegas, but it wasn't Las Vegas (you know what I mean?) and then I got lost and found a circulating swimming pool on the roof and then yelled at a guy who tried to pick pocket me. But I digress… If I nap for more than half an hour, I tend to not fall asleep at night until hours after I would like to have been in dream land. I have a problem, a real problem. It has been there all my life. I cannot enforce a personal bed time. I can try to motivate myself with thoughts of how rested I'll be, how I'll be practicing good sleep hygiene, or reason with myself that the book, internet, or television show will always be there tomorrow. Bribery does not work.

Part of what drives my behavior is that I hate, HATE, hate to turn off the light and lay in bed, trying to fall asleep. I would rather stay up really late and be completely exhausted and then instantly fall asleep. So I find things to do that keep me up. Television, the internet, and books are perfect for me. I know some people that fall asleep to books, others, like my father will stay up all night to finish a book. I always tell myself, that I'll finish the chapter, the half hour show, or this one blog post, then go to bed; but my inquiring mind has to know what comes next! And next! And next!

Sigh.

So anyways, all this was just background for what happened last night. I finally made myself go to bed at 1:30 a.m. But due to my earlier nap, I was just starting to fall asleep 45 minutes later. Etta, our big dog, wakes and shakes her head back and forth, which in turn makes her dog tags clank and clack loudly. She does this three times in a minute and I am wide awake. I tell her to lay down and I go to the bathroom. I come back into our dark bedroom and accidentally kick her in the eyeball. She squeals as though I did it on purpose and wakes up the Hubby. This is bad news because when he gets woken up in the middle of the night, he has a VERY hard time falling back to sleep. I go to bed, annoyed that we are all up and I blame Etta. But then I feel bad because I never apologized for kicking her in the eyeball, so I have to get up and pet her and apologize.
So the Hubby and I decide to try to do the things that will make us tired. He turns on the light and starts reading the John Grisham book he is reading, The Chamber. I turn on my phone's Sudoku game and play a "medium" level game. I go in circles with lots of numbers and my brain gets tired. We finally turn off the light to try to sleep. But as the Hubs put it, when the light went out, his mind turned on. We both tried to fall asleep and only around 4:00 a.m. did we both fall into uncomfortable sleep.

Because our pillows suck.

My questions:
1. How do you deal with the falling asleep thing? Read? Take something? Drink a shot?
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2. How are we ever going to handle someday being parents to a newborn baby??



Song of the night: Come Softly To Me by The Fleetwoods.

This video version is a little hard to hear but nice to watch; a clearer version can be heard here.