All messed up . . .

My sleep, that is.  For the last week, I have gone to bed sometime between 10:30 and 11:30 pm (pretty good, right?) — and not been able to sleep until 4:00 or 5:00 am.  What the?!!  The only decent night I’ve had was last night when, I’m not gonna lie, I doped myself up on sleeping pills.

Even though I’ve battled insomnia since childhood, I somehow thought that parenthood had helped me turn the corner.  I’m not talking about some kind of magic . . . but rather, being so freaking worn out that I couldn’t possibly lie awake for hours.  Guess not (and lest someone make the connection that the last time I wrote about such disordered sleep, it was on account of being pregnant . . . um, no.  Definitely no.).

Surprisingly, though, I’ve been able to make these late night vigils more effective than usual.  I was inspired by a Facebook post from my friend Jen (who moved to Arizona today — boo) about how she had to get her daughter some water at 4:00 am and couldn’t get back to sleep, so she took a take-home final.  At 4:00 am!  Usually the best I can muster is blog surfing, but this week, I wrote another section of my thesis and finished gathering my literature.  If all goes according to plan, I will write my lit review on Monday/Tuesday and send my completed prospectus to my advisor on Wednesday.  Obviously, it’s not all going to go according to my plan (if it did, I would not be a fourth-year Master’s student, would I?), but I’m pretty confident I’ll get the prospectus done sometime this week.  [And in case, you're wondering where that leaves me in the whole scheme of thesis-writing, I will have three sections done (intro, lit review, and methods) and three to go (quantitative results, qualitative results, and discussion)].  Actually, I’m pretty pleased with where things stand on the thesis-front; I’ve got momentum . . . and I haven’t had momentum since like 2008.

May is going to be a big month for me — I can just feel it.  Besides the thesis, I want to submit a paper to a conference, deadline May 27.  And hopefully, I’ll finally wrap up the draft of the paper that will not die (unexpected delays on account of some missing data that I should have noticed a long time ago — official Doh! moment-of-the-week).  My productive May will be made possible by Neal finally getting his wish and officially becoming a stay-at-home dad (no work or school), at least for a couple of months.  Here we go . . .