March 3-9 is National Sleep Awareness Week

The National Sleep Foundation, whose goal is make the public aware of the life and death importance of sleep, has designated this week as National Sleep Awareness Week.

If you have trouble sleeping and are often exhausted for "no reason," I urge you to go to their Web site and educate yourself about the importance of sleep in your daily life. Sleep, or lack thereof, greatly affects your health, mood, driving ability and job performance. It is important to know the difference between being normally tired and having a sleeping disorder.

Sleep disorders often go undiagnosed for years. I've heard, "It's normal to be tired; you work and have kids." "How late do you stay up at night?" "You're no different from anyone else," and here's the best one, "You're a middle-age woman getting ready to go through menopause. It's normal to gain weight and be tired."

EXCUSE ME????!!! It is NOT normal to fall asleep in your car while sitting at a red light, or to fall asleep standing up, only to be jolted awake by buckling knees. It is NOT normal to think you are awake in a meeting or classroom because you can hear someone talking in a faroff voice, yet when a sudden word or noise jolts you back to consciousness, you realize you were really sleeping and didn't absorb anything that was said. It is NOT normal to converse with your spouse at night (and THINK you are being attentive), only to have him say, "Let's go to bed. You're eyes are rolling up into the back of your head."

I've had doctors prescribe "get more exercise"; walk a mile a day before work to jump-start my energy. I stayed with early morning two mile walks for three months. The results of that walking put me to sleep at my desk FASTER and earlier than before the exercise. I gained more weight because I was eating sweets and candy to keep me awake during the day. The sugar-rush would last less than 30 minutes and my brain would shutdown again; it didn't want sugar - which my body stored - it wanted sleep.

Getting doctors to prescribe sleep studies can be frustrating and insurance companies balk at the expense , but sleep studies are necessary tools in identifying sleeping disorders.

So, check out the NSF's Great American Sleep Challenge: Take the quizes, read the FAQs, and educate yourself about the topic of sleep. It's important.

Cadillacs Hold Heat Pretty Well

Sleep problems in my house are as abundant as pine nuggets in my flower bed.

The first thing I usually ask my hubby each morning is "How'd you sleep?" His answers range from "The dogs' barking kept me awake all night" (which I don't understand because we sleep with a fan running and our door closed) or "I was cold/too hot" or "I woke up at 4:30a.m. and couldn't get back to sleep" and so on. Then there's me. I never get a full night's sleep and often am sure I've been awake half the night. So, given this, there was no way the following situation should have EVER happened at our house.

One Saturday morning at 6:00 a.m., Hubby jolted me awake when he leapt out of bed and ran to the living room saying, "I heard the doorbell!"

What the heck????

When he didn't come right back, I got out of bed and went to the front door. There stood our bleary-eyed teenage son, shivering. He had gone to his girlfriend's house Friday night and came home at midnight. Unfortunately, he said he was locked out of the house so he slept in his car.

What! Are you kidding????

We never lock our doors, so whatever possessed me to lock them before going to bed that night is beyond me. I didn't remember locking the doors - but that's not unusual - my short-term memory is nonexistent.

"Why didn't you ring the doorbell?" Hubby and I asked together.

"I did," our son answered. "I rang the bell for 5 minutes. Then I tried to break-in through the front windows, but they were locked, so I knocked on the windows for a few minutes. When you still didn't answer, I drove to the supermarket and called mom's cell phone from a payphone." (Our son had lost his cell phone and his replacement hadn't arrived in the mail yet. The grocery store is 3 miles from our house and they close at 11:30p.m.)

My husband looked at me questioningly.

"My cell phone is out in my truck," I said sheepishly. I had forgotten to take it into the house after running some errands on Friday.

"I ran out of change and the store was closed," our son continued, "so I came back home here and slept in my car."

"We never heard you," I said, feeling a tad guilty. "Were the dogs barking? Usually the dogs bark at everything and wake dad up."

"Yeah, they were barking," our son said emphatically. "They barked the whole time. They were going crazy for about a half hour."

I gave my husband an accusing look for not waking up. The barking dogs always wake him up. Or so he says.

So, as our poor, shivering son marched off to bed thanking God his ancient Cadillac is well-insulated because it holds heat for a long time, hubby and I played the blame game; it was my fault that our son would probably catch pneumonia because I locked the doors and it was his fault because he didn't hear the barking dogs.

The one thing we did agree on - we need to have house keys made.