As some of you have heard me talk about, I have a one year old who did not sleep through the night until almost 8 months of age. I went back to work when he was 3 months old, and was still woken up nightly, sometimes twice, for another 5 months. He is now a good sleeper, thank goodness, but my 3 1/2 year old daughter conveniently (ha ha) started having nightmares over the last few months, and will wake up crying or simply come into our room and wake me up because she is scared. (Poor thing…please understand I’m not complaining about either one of them, they are both great kids.)
So, I have been pretty tired, and my “advanced maternal age,” while something I normally just joke about, is perhaps catching up with me a little in this regard.
Concurrently with all of this, I switched from mainly drinking Coca-Cola to mainly drinking coffee, in an attempt to cut sugar from my diet, while still avoiding artificial sweeteners and maintaining some badly-needed caffeine consumption. I naively assumed that my Coke Classic habit of many, many years had made me somewhat tolerant of caffeine. Boy, was I wrong. I always felt I had a high tolerance because if I never seemed to have withdrawl issues. I am now understanding that the difference in the amount of caffeine between Coke and coffee is a Big Deal. I am trying to cut back some, as I am getting a bit more of a normal sleep schedule back, but suffice to say that now I am finding out what it REALLY means to go through caffeine withdrawl. Damn.
Not sure why I’m posting this. I guess just a mundane, pointless observation.
It doesn’t seem to take a lot to habituate yourself to coffee. I drink about three mugs a day but if I don’t get it, I get killer headaches that last for hours unless I get some. I am sure that this varies by person.
I am not “advanced maternal age.” I am 30 with a 4yr old and 2yr old and coffee has become sweet sweet nectar without which I am unable to start the day. Fortunately I have restrained myself to 2 cups a day.
I have not had a good night’s sleep in at least two weeks.
Spouse with a cold is tossing, turning, and snoring.
2yr old is teething, no longer sleeping at night.
2yr old wakes the 4yr old.
To keep 2yr old from waking 4yr old, spouse brings 2yr old into our bed.
2yr old will only sleep using my face as a pillow.
4yr old now has some nasty fever causing virus and is up all night.
4yr old ends up in our bed.
4yr old vomited on my pillow this morning.
2yr old will likely catch it next.
Solfy is a zombie who fantasizes about getting a hotel room and enjoying the blissfull silence. Just. For. One. Night.
OMG, Solfy, I feel your pain. My three year old came in our room in the middle of the night a few weeks ago because she felt sick. She made it as far as my side of the bed and proceeded to vomit all over me. Thank God it’s winter and I had a few layers of blankets on!
I quit cold turkey when I found out I was pregnant (I know “they” say you can have 1 or 2 cups of coffee a day when pregnant, but right when I found out, my father and my husband both sent me a link to a new study pointing to possible increased miscarriage risk even for light consumption, so I decided to humor everyone). I thought I was in for it bigtime, as I regularly drank two “cups” of coffee in the morning, each of which were large mugs, plenty of diet Coke throughout the day, and coffee again with dessert if any dessert happened along. I only had a fairly annoying headache all day the first day. Next day, I felt fine. I guess I really got off easy.
If you’re addicted to regular coffee, make sure you DON’T try Tanzanian Peaberry coffee, peaberries are “mutant” coffee beans, instead of the normal two beans inside the coffee “cherry”, there’s one half-sized bean, but that one half-sized bean has all the caffeine of a full sized two-bean coffee cherry
coffee made from Peaberries is exceptionally high in caffeine, I can get the wake-up-effect simply by smelling the aroma of the beans
I quit both times I was pregnant, as well. The first time, it was a breeze. The second time (once I had started drinking coffee instead of Coke), it was a little tougher. Stupid me, I didn’t get it. It wasn’t until recently when I really ramped up the coffee consumption that I realized what was going on. :smack:
