Health challenge for May: Go to bed!

Moon photography by my lovely spouse. 

So, while I technically started this post yesterday, I got distracted by something (shiny? Squirrel? Shiny squirrel?) and didn't actually finish it until today, even though I said I'd post it yesterday. Do you still love me? You do, don't you? You're awesome. Anyway:

Like so many parents of small children before us, Nick and I are in the middle of the tired years. The years of chasing busy little bodies around all day, and then collapsing in a heap of exhaustion on the couch before crawling into bed ourselves for a (hopefully uninterrupted!) night's sleep and getting up and doing it all over again the next day. And that's OK. It's the season of life that we are in right now. I've heard that there will be more sleep at some point in the future, and I can live for a long time on that promise. (NO disillusioning comments about staying up all night with teenagers, please.)

What's not so OK is the fact that we cheat ourselves of about an hour of sleep just about every night just so we can stay up and watch another episode (or three) of New Girl. It's dumb, because it just makes us tired the next day when the kids, but it's a pattern we've fallen into and stayed in for.. years? Coincidentally (or not), it's also a problem I've been trying to solve for years. See?

This time around, though, I've enlisted the help of my long-suffering and extremely supportive husband, Nick, to give this getting enough sleep thing another try. Here is our extremely simple plan:

For the month of May, we will give ourselves an actual bedtime, and go to bed at 11 PM on weeknights, with the exception of Fridays and Saturdays. That's all.

I'm curious to see if we find that we have more energy, and if so, what effect that will have on our daily lives. I wonder if we'll just enjoy getting a bit more sleep, or if we will begin to shift our day and get up earlier in response to going to bed earlier.

I know I'll be grumpy about it. I have always been a night owl (or a nightgown, as auto correct suggests) and just don't like giving up me-time or us-time, even in exchange for sleep-time. And between Netflix, Amazon and our DVR, there's always something I want to watch "just one" more episode of. But as it turns out, I do actually have a little bit (quite a lot!) of self-control, so I really think we can do it!

Night-night!