The Last Coffee, and the Last Braces

Tonight I put on my last set of invisalign-style braces!

It means wearing them for 2 months straight while I wait for the retainers to come in (they are basically the same thing), and then wearing retainers full-time for a year.  The catch is that when I drink coffee, it somehow sticks around and stains the top tray after about a week, and by week 2 it is definitely noticeable... by week 8 or 30 or 50 it would be disgusting.  And so, I must give up coffee.

The last coffee.  Of course, Torin had to add his special touch.  I had to reheat this cup 4 times and still finished it cold because toddler.

I am so very ready to be done with the "moving" part of braces. 

I'm done with wiggly teeth... considering that loose/missing top front teeth are my biggest paranoia, this has been a trying time!  Wiggly teeth are not calming, fun, or sexy.  Hahaha, I feel like that sums up my last year. 


There's still a year of wearing the aligners.

Wearing braces means having to hold my lips pinched closed strangely (I look snooty and bitchy) and talking with a light lisp and not being able to smile properly, it just makes the social anxiety worse.  I'm really looking forward to eating when I'm hungry instead of waiting until I'm starving and then overeating because I know it's another 6 hours until I take the braces off again.  OMGs it's going to be so awesome to be free of it eventually.



It's been worth it though. 

I have been getting almost no headaches, which I think is partially because I don't have to hold my jaw back a little strangely to get the teeth to fit together.  My teeth are so straight again! 

I gave up coffee for 4 years once (and caffeine for about 5.5-6 years?)... the absence definitely made my heart grow fonder.  I can only imagine that at the end of the year, I will go on a crazy coffee binge.  Put it in your calendars, and avoid me around the summer solstice of 2018!

In the meantime, there's always tea.  

An Average Night

Ever since my Fitbit started tracking sleep stages a little over 3 weeks ago, I've been noticing a MAJOR trend.

The Trends

This is the amount in each stage (Light is stages 1 & 2, Deep is 3&4) for last night, and when compared to my 30-day average, it is spot on!

For comparison, this is where the "benchmarks" are, where women my age experience their sleep state averages.

Light Sleep

I'm always at the top of the range for light sleep.  I would say that half of the time spent in light sleep I actually experience as awake, because I'm calmly laying there but I am fully aware of and remember all the sounds and random itches and joint soreness, and I'm turning/itching/stretching frequently in an attempt to get comfy.


Deep Sleep

I could use some serious improvements here.

If I'm getting half of what "they" say is the minimum for feeling rested the next day, and there is no other medical cause, maybe this is why I am so freaking exhausted.  1.6 hours is theoretically the minimum, and over the last month I have never exceeded 56 minutes (including when I had 8 hours of sleep in a night, which hadn't happened since November!!).

When scouring the internet for how to specifically improve deep sleep stages, a few things really popped out:

1. You get more deep sleep from 11pm-3am, and more REM from 3am-7am, no matter what your usual schedule looks like.  I typically can't fall asleep before 2am, and always feel like my best sleep is after 5 or 6am.
2. Medications/alcohol taken at bedtime can disrupt deep sleep.  I'm good with alcohol, but I do take all my allergy/asthma meds directly at bedtime to attempt to sleep through the buzzy brainfog they give me.  Maybe the buzzy part is hurting sleep!
3. Pain at night.  My hips and knots hurt significantly more at night.

The Plan of Attack

All right, so there are some obvious things I can attempt to improve.

1. Better sleep schedule.  If I'm more consistent with Torin's bedtime, and cut out my only hour of alone/husband time in the day, I could get into bed by 11 instead of midnight.  This would be improved as I fully train Torin to go to sleep by himself... but he just transitioned to a big-boy bed a week ago and I won't mess with what's working for another week or two. 
2. Switch up the medication schedule.  I'll try taking them at dinner instead of bedtime... but if there's no improvement, I'll switch to lunch or breakfast.  I'm already taking the bare minimum.
3. A better strengthening/stretching regimen.  Recovery after exercise has been taking me out of commission, because hypermobility sucks.  I think I need to swallow my pride and open up my yoga/pilates videos for pregnant ladies, since those ones are made for people with loose joints who are prone to injury.  And I definitely need to foam roll more.  I could also lose another 30lbs... still working on that one.

This post is mostly for my own records, my official sleep baseline before I start fiddling with it.  I'll let you know if anything works!

Life, uh, finds a way.

The entire west side of the property is under construction and the plants left behind (I did save a bunch) are not expected to survive.

This freesia has other ideas!

A bloom amidst the rubble.

We tried to get started on the project of changing the rotting retaining wall out ourselves, but eventually admitted that with Ryan's job schedule keeping him away plus my full-time toddler wrangling, we just weren't going to be able to tackle the project before summer.  Or even next summer.  Unfortunately the wall was falling down in too many places, and it had become a danger to toddlers. 

So we hired a landscaper!  

The company is in the process of...
- tearing down the wood retaining wall
- replacing retaining wall with large stone bricks
- paving the northwest corner
- adding LED lighting along the wall and paved area
- topping the retaining wall along the paved area to make a bench (this has been extended along the pool side too!)
- putting in a drip system
- redoing the retaining wall in the front yard, and giving us extra planting space
- putting a fence around the tangled mass of pool equipment
- digging out the area next to the west side of the house and putting in decomposed granite, leaving only the wine grape vines behind

It's going to be up to us to...
- sell the trailer (we decided that the extra backyard space is more important for this life stage)
- replant along the whole length of the west fence, front and back
- purchase a gas fire pit, for the paved area
- find outdoor furniture for the paved area
- find a decorative planter for the spot next to the pool equipment
- train the grape vines back up the side of the house again... we love the look, but tried to get them to grow on a trellis instead (to keep moisture away from the house) and it didn't work!  Instead, we will tear them down every 3 years to repaint the side of the house, as the previous owners did. 

Whew!  So much to do.  So much transformation.  So many backyard safety features.  So long, tax return. 

I can't wait to use the area this summer!

Green "Thumb"

It must be spring!

I have no idea where that oak leaf on the porch came from...

What better way to get back to blogging than to share the joy of discovering that my new nail polish perfectly matches the green growth of spring in sunlight?  I was just trying to find a color* that matched a skirt for a special event.

Bear with the paint job, it's been 5 or 6 years since I did anything besides buff my nails.  I don't even have nail polish remover in the house!


Where have I been?!

It's been a long time since I posted here.  I've just been drained for the past year.  Let's break it down.

• Lost the last 4 grandparents, so it feels like the Grim Reaper just swung his scythe and felled an entire generation at once... I feel older now.  It still doesn't seem quite real.  I'm glad Torin got to meet them all, but it's an especially weird punch to the gut that he won't grow up knowing my grandpa the outdoorsman.  I'm going to be the one teaching Torin to fish and find edible plants instead, but my knowledge is not nearly as vast and hands-on as grandpa's... I suppose that's the natural progression of things. 
• Torin and I were both alternately sick with colds/etc for 3 months straight, and it made me super aware of how hard and draining it is to single-mom it half the week.  I'm hyper-aware of it now, and have probably been needlessly bitchy... I'm a major introvert, and extracting time for myself has been like squeezing water from a stone. 
• Toddlerhood has been unbelievably awesome and time/energy-consuming, and I love watching Torin become his own person, but I'm also feeling a sense of loss because we're nearly finished weaning (for fertility reasons) even though we both really don't want to wean.  But if he wants a sibling, it's gotta happen soon.
• Braces have been an unending pain in the jaw, that affects everything from socializing (I still talk/smile weird and it makes me self-conscious) to eating (I get so little braces-free time that I stuff my face to keep from feeling like I'm starving) to romance (mouth pain and wiggly teeth are NOT sexy).  It should have been over by last month, but one tooth didn't move, and after a few months of telling the dentist that it wasn't moving and that it was very painful to wear braces that didn't fit, they finally admitted it didn't work.  So I'm basically starting almost from scratch with a new set.  I've already paid for the braces through them (and these revisions are "free," only paid for with time and frustration), so I can't leave this dentist... but will as soon as I can. 
• Self-improvement and house stuff and personal/craft projects have been totally abandoned in the meantime, and I've been feeling pretty unhealthy and uninspired. 

New stuff is around the corner!

But I want to share a TON of fun and inspiring stuff that's on the brink of happening... it's time for planting, the back yard is currently under some much-needed professional construction, the sun is coming out after the wettest winter I can remember... and yesterday was the last risk of frost in the garden!!  My plan for this season is to have much simpler, shorter posts, always with a photo, not worrying about having "quality" posts... lower expectations for myself, basically.

Perfection is the enemy of progress, right?


*Sally Hansen #369 Green Thumb