Sleepless

I can count on one hand the number of times that I've been awake for the sunrise. I feel that it is unnatural for any sane person to be awake at that hour in the morning. I can (and often do, recently) sleep until noon. And yet here I am, at not quite 6 am, wide awake and watching the sky getting increasingly brighter outside our little basement window.

I used to be a GREAT sleeper. I could sleep anywhere, in any position, easily for 12 hours straight. I remember a Monday night a couple years ago when, in the middle of folding and sorting clean laundry on my bed, I got sleepy and decided to take a quick nap. I crawled into the corner of my bed where there was about a square foot of empty space, curled into a ball half-covered with clothes, and fell asleep for a few hours. (The best naps, by the way, are at least 3 hours long.)

I used to sleep so deeply, too. I used to joke around that someone could break in my bedroom window, steal everything in the room including the sheets I was sleeping on, and I would still be asleep when they left. I'm pretty sure every one of my roommates wanted to kill me at one time or another, because I was one of those annoying people whose alarm clock would beep, and beep, and beep... and they never wake up. Or I would somehow hit snooze before I was conscious enough to comprehend that I needed to wake up, so my alarm would go off numerous times.

Sadly, I don't sleep well anymore. I wake up to the smallest noises, and once woken up, I have a hard time getting back to sleep. And my bladder control is not at all what it once was--I wake up at least once or twice every night because I have to pee. I'm pretty sure I have Naomi to blame for my sleep problems... but she's so adorable that I will forgive her.