The cat who wakes me up at night if my door is not open to his liking.

Sometimes I wake up feeling a little sad.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t sleep so well a few nights ago. It’s very good having my youngest child home for the Christmas holiday. But it also means that I tend to stay up a little later than usual, and my child stays up later than me, and sometimes leaves lights on and falls asleep on the couch. The problem with this is that I have to leave my bedroom door cracked a little, so the cat can come and go as he pleases. I’ve shut my door in the past so that the living room lights don’t bother me, but then the cat decides that he needs to enter and scratches at the door and meows until I get up and open it. So my door has to stay open, which means I can see the lights, just a little.

I woke up a few times, saw that the lights were still on, but managed to go back to sleep and ignore them. But at 4:30 am, I woke up enough to stumble into the living room, turn off the lights, and say something slightly snarky to the child who was asleep on the couch. There was then a good deal of rumbling around the living room as he got up and staggered to bed, where his blissful sleep continued. Except mine didn’t; I didn’t go back to sleep at all. My alarm sounded at 5:30 am, because you know, I’ve been trying to set it so that I get up in the morning and do things that make my day go better, like writing these posts!

Also the other day, my son’s dentist called and needed to reschedule the appointment that we made months ago. Then our doctor called and said the same thing, that we needed to reschedule the appointments I made in September because the doctor would be out of the office that week.

Isn’t this something they should have known before they set the appointments months ago? The doctor just decided this week that she doesn’t want to work Christmas week?

I’m listening to a book called “Happiness for Beginners” by Katherine Center. It was made into a Netflix special, which I haven’t watched yet. In the book, the main character is encouraged to focus on things that make her happy—not things that make her sad. It’s good advice, of course. It says, “Happy people are more likely to register joy than unhappy people. So if you take two people who have experienced a day of, say, fifty percent good things and fifty percent bad things, an unhappy person would remember more of the bad.”

Sometimes, unfortunately? I’m a person who remembers the bad. I can focus on things that go wrong.  I was so annoyed by the dual doctors’ offices calling to switch things around! And then I didn’t sleep that well, and my phone even confirmed this, telling me for the first time ever that my sleep was only okay and that I might not have gotten sufficient rest. Bother! Continue Reading…