Coffee and Naps

The most significant change for me since becoming a father has probably been napping and coffee.

I mean, you know, aside from the unconditional love and constant stress about whether I'm doing a good job and how we're going to pay for her university education and speaking of education should we enroll her in private school or should we just find tutors or maybe that's too much pressure and we should just let her play and be a kid but we still have to provide guidance and do whatever we can to get her on a path with all the opportunities she'll need to be happy and successful in whatever she should decide to do with her life. Besides all that, coffee and naps.

I did not like napping. It felt like the worst thing ever, waking up from a nap. And you lose so much time that could be used playing or reading or doing anything else interesting besides sleeping. Naps were my enemy, and I avoided them as much as possible. Now, not a day goes by that I don't dream about taking a nap.

I feel bad for what probably happened to the bunny.

Just to get an extra 20 minutes of uninterrupted sleep in the middle of the day... Heavenly. I'm not sure how much of my newfound love and respect for the nap has to do with the fact that if I'm not napping, that time would now be used for dishes or laundry or getting groceries. The video game time is still there, it's just more guilt ridden now than ever before.

Naps now represent small slices of time when I know that everything is okay. RG is asleep, or My Lovely Wife has her entertained or occupied and I know that I can relax without fearing for her safety. Those slices become super important sanity checks I think.  New parent tip: sometimes you have to take the nap, even when you have to do a thousand other things.

And that brings me to coffee. Sweet vanilla hazelnut I am a convert. I mean, I could stop whenever I want, but I'll feel like a sack of garbage when I do. A big old tired sack of garbage. There was a time when I drank a half-coffee/half-hot chocolate (I can't call it a mochachino because I didn't put whip cream on it or pay $5 for it), but only at work.  I am up to two cups in the morning on weekdays plus an afternoon cup on the weekends. A big thank you to my friends at Keurig. They aren't really my friends, I don't know them personally, but I feel that the work they have done puts them on the same level as the people that make the internet work. I don't know who you are, but I think you should be given accolades on a regular basis.

I used to make fun of coffee drinkers. It's true. I would raise my nose just a little when they would all huddle around the carafe at work, with desperate eyes watching for the last drop to fall. I thought I was better than they were. Come to think of it, I guess I still do. After all, I'm only drinking this because I was up early with my daughter. They were probably all out at the bar disappointing their parents. Disgraceful.

What does that say about me that the two things that have most changed are that I need more sleep and that I caffeine to function? I guess that it says I'm a father.

And now RG's nap is over and I used it all up writing this. Dang it. I could have had a great nap.  I guess that's the thing though - if you can't have a nap, you can have a cup of coffee.

How about you guys? Anyone have any tips on how to best maximize the coffee/nap ratio?