Me, In Bed

Ha ha! Made you look!
But no, really, this one's about bed, just not in the way you were hoping. Still in Week #1 of my little project and working on boosting energy and getting healthy. Day #5 of the raw foods diet is going swimmingly. Picked up a wonderful little uncooked book titled "The Everything Raw Food Recipe Book" filled with everything from veggie pasta (no, not vegan . . . no soy or tofu here) to key lime pie and mint chocolate cheesecake. The morning barley and alfalfa is getting easier to swallow, thanks to Chris' amazing juicing skills. We may have ruined Bonnie, though. She was drinking Odwalla carrot juice just fine a week ago, but once we got our juicer (not the greatest, but the it's what we could afford) there was pulp in her juice and now she won't go near the stuff, even when we strain it. We're considering putting her back on Odwalla until we're able to get a good juicer.
And speaking of Bonnie, she's really put a kink in my "getting better sleep" plan. Phase one was to tackle the bedroom itself. My bedroom has a tendency to be the catch-all for the rest of the house. If someone rings my doorbell, the dog and whatever laundry I was folding get rushed back to our room. Ideally, every one's shoes come off when they walk in the door. Unfortunately, this leads to the inevitable pile of shoes in the front hall. The kids are great about picking them up for me, but I trip over them later because they usually just toss them right inside the doorway. In my frustration (and usually because my hands are full), I kick the shoes to the side, building yet another shoe pile in my room. Things that don't match any other room of the house end up in there, that big box of outgrown clothes that needs to go to Goodwill got shoved in there. Like I said, catch-all. But no more! A master bedroom should be a sanctuary, a place for adults only. So I spent all of Sunday afternoon putting away that laundry, moving the boxes out and attempting to restore the calm to the master bedroom. With the bedroom in order, it was time to move on to phase two: getting to bed earlier. Chris and I have a very bad habit of staying up way too late. We've never been good at keeping schedules, so dinner all too often falls around 7pm, making bed time for Chris and I after 11. My new mini-resolution (as part of the larger boost energy/get healthy resolution) is to have dinner ready no later than 5:30. If we eat dinner early, we'll have plenty of time to go for our after dinner walk, get all the kids bathed and in bed by 9 and retreat to our little adults-only sanctuary by 10. With five hours between dinner and bed time, we'll have to go to bed early out of either exhaustion or just sheer boredom : )
While it all looks great on paper, even the best laid plans can be completely obliterated by a toddler. She has absolutely no desire to go to bed at 8:30 because it's still somewhat light out. At 9, when it's nearly dark, she starts to get grumpy. The more you try to get her to bed, the more she fights it . . . and the more she fights, the later we all end up getting to bed. It's a vicious cycle that I don't really know how to end. So for now, we will stick with the plan and hopefully she'll get the memo at some point. After all, shutting off the tv and just laying in darkness while she cries herself out is much better than falling asleep on the couch at midnight with the tv on and waking up at 3am and trying to haul yourself to bed.