The challenges of being a night owl

I wrote the following early Saturday morning, before we had set up our blog. Now I’m finally getting around to posting it.

It’s two in the morning and I can’t sleep…again. I’ve always been envious of people with normal circadian rhythms, which is most of the people I know. They don’t know how grateful they should be that they can go to sleep and wake up at the same times that most everyone else around them does. It can be quite challenging having to adapt to other people’s schedules. It is also frustrating to need so much more sleep than most other people do. I feel like I never accomplish anything of value because I spend my only few productive hours doing monotonous things that have to be done over and over again, like cooking, eating, cleaning, and running errands. Although, I must admit that I have enjoyed the recent addition of another activity that must be done several times a day…feeding and caring for my sweet baby! (Thank the Lord that she takes long morning naps!)

This would be a great time for me to go grocery shopping. I was too tired to do it earlier today, and now I’m wide awake. Super Walmart is open, but I don’t feel safe going there at night by myself. It was so nice when we lived in a small college town where everything was open late, I could satisfy a late-night craving for my favorite pizza rolls, and it was quite normal to see lots of people…nice people…at Super Walmart in the middle of the night. But alas, we live in the big city now, and I must exercise a certain amount of caution. And there’s also the fear that my baby would wake up while I was gone and her daddy, being the world’s heaviest sleeper, would not hear her. But I think her track record of sleeping through the night is good enough now that I would be willing to take the chance of leaving, if it weren’t for the safety issue.

Being a night owl also is somewhat limiting on one’s social life, at least in this culture. Most Mommy groups meet in the mornings long before I’m coherent. And it’s kind of difficult to have friends over for dinner on a weeknight, when commuter traffic is bad and everyone else has to get up early to go to work the next morning. And it seems like most weekends end up getting spent catching up on everything that didn’t get done during the week…like sleep, for example. Oh, to live in the Latin American culture, where household labor is cheap and the party is just beginning at midnight!