Today

Two things: I decided it might work better if we shift our schedule forward (called Chronotherapy) rather than backward. It worked for Tim. I'm a little nervous about going to bed at noon or two, but at least this way we get to sleep as much as we want, instead of constantly being sleep deprived. It was originally suggested to us when Caleb was 2, but the doctor who suggested it said try moving forward 1 hour a night, and we were pretty sure that would permanently shift us to a 25-hour day, and we didn't want that. This time, we're trying 3-5 hours forward each day. So I got up at 5:30 today after not enough sleep (because someone woke me up and needed me). If we do what we've planned, we go to bed sometime around 9:00 am and sleep as long as we can--probably until 9:00 pm or 10:00 pm. The next "day" (it starts getting hazy during this time since we become seriously divorced from light and darkness cycles), we go to bed sometime between 1:00 and 3:00 pm and sleep until 2:00 am or so. Then we go to bed between 5:00 and 8:00 pm, etc....until we're going to bed at midnight, and there we stay.  Why not stay at 8:00 pm, you ask? Well, Tim was on a very normal 10:00 pm-6:00 am sleep schedule all week, and it was hard for him to do his job. Entertainment happens at night, after all! Tonight he was out meeting with people, doing performances, and more meetings until 1:00 am, and then he was nearly too tired to drive home from Denver (an hour away). So it's better for all of us if bedtime is midnight or 2:00 am.

It seems like it would be easier to shift our sleep 3-4 hours earlier rather than 20 hours later, but we've been trying for 2 weeks, and this is what happened: I was robbed of all my creative hours and STILL didn't get enough sleep--just had lots of bedtime tension and then we all lay there, wide awake, for 2 or 3 hours. No shifting happened. Plus, we're night people. It's easier for us to stay up CONSIDERABLY later (like 3 hours each night) than it is for us to go to bed a tiny bit earlier.

UNFORTUNATELY, we're doing this experiment right on top of a major physical project: moving in.

Yes, our stuff came. Almost all of it. First my Dad brought us a huge vanload of our stuff from Utah (hooray! Thank you, Dad!). Then, two days later, the storage unit from Vegas landed on our driveway.

All of that happened rather suddenly, and we discovered we weren't quite ready for it. In order to unpack the storage unit, we had to deal with some of the things that Dad brought first, including re-doing the flooring in the kids' bedrooms (we're replacing the carpet that we put in 5 years ago with hardwood we bought for Mom and Dad, but then they decided to go with etched concrete (since they have concrete floors and radiant heating anyway). And Dad brought the wood.

So today I ripped out the carpet in the kids' room, pulled out the tack strips (which came up fairly easily, mercifully), pulled up the stapled-down carpet pad, swept, and replaced the carpet. (After we noticed written in sharpie on the subflooring, "Caleb (age3) and Anda (18 months) are excited to have their new carpet. 12/2004".) Then I pried off all the baseboards, which were stuck hard with rusty nails--original to the house from 1972.

Why replace the carpet, you ask? We're using it as underlayment for the hardwood. It's not your standard underlayment, but the room is over the garage in part, and over Tim's studio in part. We wanted the insulation from the cold from the garage (for the bedroom's sake) and the noise of wood-on-wood (for the studio's sake). So the carpet stays. We'll "float" the wood on top and anchor it with the baseboards when we're done.

At least, that's the plan. We'll see what actually happens when I start laying the wood tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure it was a good plan to start remodeling in a hurry the same week we're trying to shift forward 3-5 hours each night. I'm so tired after ripping the room apart all day by myself that I'm not sure I'm gonna make it the necessary 5 more hours awake!

(Next projects: Moving as much stuff in as we can put away, flooring in the baby's room, and building cupboards in the living room. I think I know how now.)