This Happened

[Phoebe]

Yes, I endorse what the person above said. Dogs well trained to be polite wouldn't do that even if they suddenly got loose. Call the police or animal control if they get loose again, because they probably didn't learn anything useful from the experience and might be worse the next time. Occasionally dogs kill people; one nearly killed my daughter's friend.

[Phoebe]

Bifocals: what the f*** is this latest bulls*** now??? How is it possible that such a large proportion of the population is walking around right the f*** now not to mention driving cars with this crazy ass stupid s*** on their face?

[Mike]

Thank God for my bifocals. The difference is amazing.

[Phoebe]

Yeah you're correct about the difference being amazing. But what good is the difference, what good is being able to see at all, if you have to walk around with funhouse mirrors strapped to both of your eyes all day? This s*** is madness I'm telling you, it's absolute Madness. I have vertigo on a nearly constant basis, pretty much every time I move my head in a slight twitch.

[Phoebe]

Gave up on glasses. Gave up on kids sleeping like normal people would. Gave up on kids eating a normal meal. One ate three bites of noodles and the others each ate about half a chicken breast. The end. That was dinner. Now they are apparently practicing for the medical residency time when they'll never sleep. What other reason could explain it? Why does child 2 sleep like clockwork from 9:30 - 7:30 every night and the others appear to have no inner clock at all?

[Zen]

Speaking as a person with a non-functioning internal clock, hey... it happens...

I have had varying degrees of insomnia my whole life. When I finally got around to having sleep studies about 12 years ago, the findings were quite interesting. They found:

1. Mild to moderate sleep apnea, but only when I rolled over on my back.
2. I didn't get nearly enough time in the following stages of sleep: Stage 3, Stage 4, REM. I spent less than 5% of the night in Stages 3 & 4 combined and less than 10% in REM. The vast majority of the time I was in Stage 1.

When I had further studies with CPAP and BiPAP machines to combat the sleep apnea, they found that they were able to eliminate the apnea events, but that did NOTHING to increase the amount of time in the "deep sleep" stages or REM. Indeed, in the second study, when they eliminated the apneic events, I was in Stage 3 for 4% of the night and never entered Stage 4.

Because I had trouble tolerating the CPAP I did another study to get a BiPAP and the results were pretty much the same: no apneic events, but practically no deep sleep.

After the first study, I asked the sleep technician if this could be why four hours of sleep seems to be just as good as, if not sometimes better than, eight hours for me. His response was that four hours was probably about how much sleep I was functionally getting.

Now, years later, I can't use the machine because my lower back arthritis doesn't allow me to sleep on my back, so I can't really wear the mask correctly. (I always found it ironic that in order to actually wear the mask to correct the apnea I had to sleep in the position that CAUSED the apneic events... Kind of stupid...) I generally can't sleep on my back now because of pain. I occasionally will roll over onto my back, but I usually wake up because it hurts too much. So my BiPAP is basically a paper weight and I'm sure that the mask I used to wear would need to be replaced if I wanted to start using it again.

So, anyway, the point of this rant is that there could be a reason for your child's lack of ability to sleep. It could be just a phase, or some sort of anxiety, or any number of things that are causing him/her to not be able to get to sleep, but if it seems chronic, you might want to look into sleep testing...

My son just went in for sleep testing because of apnea. He is turning 21 next fall and is rather overweight, but he has always snored, and, frankly, always had similar sleep patterns to me. (This is the one who was colicky and never slept as a baby and screamed most of the time...) He seems to be doing well with his CPAP. I think his girlfriend is very appreciative of it! (She is the real winner there. Eliminating his snoring and the apneic events means she doesn't wake up when he stops breathing and freak out about it. I think she's a light sleeper...)

[Mike]

Bifocals:

A) As mentioned, they work great. Before the bifocals, I had just become resigned to loss of close focus, but now I have my cake and eat it too.

B) They don't LOOK like fun-house mirrors. So no one knows.

C) After 48 hours I didn't even notice them any more. You quickly learn when to use and when not to use different areas of the lenses. I typically don't even remember that I even HAVE bifocals unless someone mentions it. And then it's like, "Oh yeah... I wonder why I never have problems with them anymore..." and I'll intentionally look through the bottoms of the lenses while trying to walk and go... "Oh yeah.. THERE is it." But I don't see it unless I'm looking for it.

And to be fair, I say 48 hours, but truthfully, I had occasional issues with walking down stairs for about a week. But even that got trained out of me.

[Zen]

[Phoebe]

I'm trying again this morning but come on, this is ridiculous. My phone looks like a weird parallelogram.

[Mike]

Your phone has always been a parallelogram.

[Phoebe]

Well it wasn't a weird one.

[Eliahad]

Mike, Pheebs. You just made my day, and it just started. Thank you.

[Mike]

You are welcome!

[Tahlvin]

My daughter had auditioned for the state-wide high school honors band, for both the concert band and jazz ensemble, playing alto sax. They'll only pick you for one, and they'll pick you for whichever band and position they think you'll be the best fit and where they have the most need. So she was selected as the first alternate to play bari sax on the jazz ensemble; if even one of the bari sax players drops out, she'll be in the band. And apparently, they have a history of using a pretty good number of alternates, so chances are looking pretty good that she'll be doing this. But in order to do it, she'll have to learn bari sax instead of alto sax. She seems kind of excited about it.

In other daughter news, she received a recruiting letter at school yesterday from the head swim coach at a division 3 college here in the state. She took almost 2 years off swimming and didn't join the team this past season until the day before their first swim meet, but by the end of the season she was back up to getting personal best times. She doesn't want to swim in college, but it's certainly nice to know that she could if she wanted to, and possibly get some financial assistance from doing so.

[Phoebe]

Those are great developments!!! And swimming in college might be worthwhile. The odds of continuing it for a lifetime go up with that investment​ of effort, which would be a great thing. And it dumps you straight into a group of friends at college, some of whom are bound to be upperclassmen, which is nice. You never know... Also $$$...

[Tahlvin]

[Zen]

[Tahlvin]

[Phoebe]

It's such a hard thing to pick schools. I dread this issue coming up in a few years for us, though I'm excited to see how it will turn out. My husband and I, it turns out, have very different ideas. My idea is to take all of our money and waste it on fancy college educations at whatever place they want to attend, regardless of cost. My husband's idea is to get them in and out of undergrad in 3 years at the least expensive decent option and then on to grad or professional school. Ok, that makes sense under the right circumstances, but I would think very atypical circumstances. What's the hurry? Are the opportunity costs really so great of just taking the time to enjoy your life in college and learn whatever you like in a special hothouse environment as if you were some rare flower? Why not be a rare flower?

On the other hand, here's a problem: If one of us just quit our job and we lived on a single salary, we'd probably qualify for some financial aid somewhere along the line or at the very least wouldn't have to pay full freight at fancy schools for hothouse flowers. But if we make more money, then we can just turn around and cut a check to the college without passing Go or collecting our $200. What is the motivation?

It's the same deal when you get old: if you can make SO MUCH Money that you can afford to stay in your home, have a fancy nurse come when your health problems get bad, and pass some money along to your grandkids, then so much the better for you. But if you make just enough money that you'll have to spend all of it down in a nursing home until Medicaid kicks in, and you won't get anything or pass anything along to your kids, why the hell are you working so hard to make money? It's like, SUPER-RICH or go home. So I had better stop typing here and go work on my investment portfolio or business idea or something.

[Tahlvin]

We've told our kids for quite some time that we will only pay for 4 years of undergrad at in-state tuition and room & board rates to the local state school, and they need to get good grades and pick a reasonable major that will pay for itself. If they go someplace more expensive, they pay the difference by working, not with loans. Same thing if they go longer than 4 years. And if they goof off and get bad grades, the free ride comes to a screeching halt immediately. In all but a few majors, where you get your undergrad doesn't matter much at all, so we're not going to risk our retirement or have our kids go deep in debt to go to an expensive prestige school, or to go to school someplace exotic. And we're not going to risk our retirement or them going in debt for them to "find themselves." If that's what they want, they can take a year or two off between high school and college to work and do their discovery, then take the free ride for 4 years.