Coffee!

I just poured myself a small cup of caffeinated coffee, my first in nearly a month, and I’m thinking to myself, why on earth do I even need this? But I do– I feel like this entire third trimester has my brain wrapped in a anxious and impatient fog. Plus I have a short paper on Conrad to write by tomorrow evening. So I am drinking coffee, not to stay awake, but to give myself that extra jolt of mental agility.

I kid you not when I say that it will pain you to know how much sleep I’ve been getting lately. I usually go to bed at around 10:30-11:30, when Jesse does. I wake up at 6:10 so that I can eat breakfast with him, and then I go back to sleep….for about 4 hours. And then, I sometimes take another 1-2 hour nap. Folks, I’m clocking in at around 10-13 hours of sleep a day, and I’m still counting down the minutes when I can go back to sleep again every night!

I have this luxury, seeing as my job does not have many hours to it. It’s really the very delicious part about teaching piano– I work around 15-20 hours each week, making more money than I did teaching high school. As a result, I have every day until 2 or 3pm all to myself.

It’s not all fun and games, because I am finishing up my last two graduate classes, which involve a lot of reading and writing. And I am trying to prepare for this thing I usually call a baby, but will refer to him in this post as “he-who-punches-holes-in-my-intestines”. I also try to have the house clean, laundry and ironing done and a dinner plan laid out so that Jesse can come home and relax. While he usually does need to make dinner (unless he wants to eat close to 8pm when I get home!), I try to have everything there at his disposal, including a recipe. Plus, he loves to cook. He emailed me from work on Tuesday, saying, “I have this dream of making peach cobbler…will you help me realize this dream?”

I know that I need the extra sleep. He-who-punches-holes-in-my-intestines makes me very weary. Getting in and out of the car is a massive feat. Swimming is about the only aerobic activity that I still enjoy, simply because it doesn’t have massive consequences for my ability to function later. I can’t open and close my hands for the first half of the day. My hips hurt so much from expansion that I develop huge burning knots on either side of my pelvis. He-who-punches-holes-in-my-intestines has his feet and knees kicking on my tail bone, making me feel as though a had a huge fall at a roller skating rink.

So, I asked Jesse the other day, which would he prefer? To have a nice day of leisure, reading and writing, with the occasional housework and errand to run, but be unable to walk or bend over without pain, having to pee every 2-4 hours of the night? Or would he rather work a long, nine hour day but have his bodily health intact, able to do and eat anything he wants when he gets home?

He had to think about it, but decided that he wants the first part of my situation, added into the last part of his. I said that’s cheating.

UPDATE: 3 pages of my Conrad paper cranked out in 45 minutes. Wow, that coffee sure helped!! Let’s just hope it makes sense…