I am 39 this year. My birthday was August 26.

I am painfully conscious of the fact that this is the last year of my 3rd decade.... that FORTY is coming. As such, I decided that if I was EVER going to get my ass in gear, it should be THIS YEAR... so that I could go into my next decade with some semblance of order/balance/peace.

I purchased a book called "The Gift of a Year" by Mira Kirchenbaum. The premise: taking a whole year to do something 'for yourself'. It could be anything---a sabbatical, planning for and then finally taking the 'trip of a lifetime', or just plain focusing on self-nurture...

I chose the plain focusing on self-nurture and decided, as simple as it sounded, I was going to give myself the gift of a year of SLEEP. Going to bed at a reasonable hour for a whole year.

I started September 1. And as luck would have it, right around that time, my son (aged 2.5) is changing his sleep patterns and is not passing out before 9:30 the earliest... Which doesn't leave me very much free time before I'm choosing to hit the hay. This has become an issue for me. I need the down time, to read, to putter, maybe to take a shower. So it's now become a pain in the butt to go to bed early... because I want to read!

I think I need to re-think my gift of a year, ha ha! No point in doing something that adds tension instead of taking it away.