Midnight Musings

Perhaps one of the greatest gifts God gives mothers is the inability to always sleep through the night.

I used to consider this to be the bane of my existence, because insomnia seems to run in my family, and I would resent the lack of sleep, the gritty eyes the next morning, the frustration of tossing and turning...for HOURS!

...until it dawned on me that some of my most creative ideas occurred in the wee hours of the morning...

Did I really want to stop this flow of creative juices?  Wasn't it worth the gritty eyes and stumbling feet to be able to look at something I had written, worked on, or "tweaked" during the night was suddenly, simply brilliant?

I figured out how to create a quilting hoop for my quilting doll...in the middle of the night...

This middle of the night breakthrough was to make the perfect mob-cap for my quilting doll.

Yes, I'll admit, some things that seem brilliant during those hours between waking and dawn, don't quite stand up to the light of day.  But on the other hand, many problems I've been struggling with go with me to bed, and in my dreams I come up with a solution.  When I wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning, I have no choice.  I have to see if my solution was right.

And I'm here to tell you that YES, it often is.

That's the best reason for insomnia...the other reason is that it gives me a couple of uninterrupted hours of working on something that I wouldn't normally get during the day. It doesn't matter if I'm working on an article, a book, a doll, a quilt...having that uninterrupted time is priceless.

It took me a lot of years to realize how precious that time really is.  Having homeschooled for so many years, and working from home for 23 years, I'm not alone very often.  In fact, I'm not even alone now.  All the cats and the dog think that my nighttime excursions are pretty exciting.  Until they realize that I'm not doing anything interesting, like going for a walk, or fixing food.  Once they express their disappointment, they all go back to sleep, and it is peaceful once again...

...until 5 am when my daughters have to get up to get ready for work.  Guess it's time for me to go back to bed and catch a couple hours of shut-eye.

Isn't it fun that we had this talk?