Daddy life lesson: Don’t forget to take care of yourself

While I think I may have fixed my near-lifetime sleep disorder with some software, I found that even with sleeping mostly uninterrupted I was still starting to become extremely worn down nearing 13 months of babydom even with baby sleeping through the night.

It probably doesn’t help that I’ve put on weight this year. Well, not so much put on as shifted. I’ve got a significantly more muscular back, stomach and arms that are for the first time in my life not cringe-worthy. OK, my stomach still is, but whatever.

Every day for the past few months I woke up from my sleep, brain almost ready (now that I’m  actually sleeping,) and body feeling like I’m waking up on a planet with higher gravity than I went to sleep on.

I would stumble out of bed. Literally swaying because the world feels heavy. I would then go down the stairs holding onto the rail because my balance was off. Sometimes I’d stand by the baby’s crib for a minute until I felt I was good to deadlift a 20+ pound wiggling baby critter.

Waves of physical exhaustion have been a thing for me lately – being so tired that I don’t want to move, but not sleepy in the least. That’s rarely happened in the past. One was always linked to the other.

I figured it out a couple of weeks back. Babies are nearly a full body workout, and although I have been eating pretty well I have not been getting enough of something that I’m guessing has to do with muscle recovery. What that something is I don’t know, but I think it’s found in my multi vitamin which I had stopped taking quite a while back.

Since restarting vitamins I’m still tired, but getting better as opposed to going down the spiral. Soreness is still here, but the waves of exhaustion seem to be pretty much diminishing. This from a bottle of Kirkland’s finest Centrum-complete competitor vitamins.

That’s about that. Not going to try and sell you anything. If you’re a Costco member, I’m using the “Compare to Centrum Complete” version. Yesterday I managed to make a decent sized garden, weed, trim some hedges, pot flower, and baby a bit. A couple of weeks ago with the waves of tired and coming off of being sick for so freaking long this would be a very impressive feat.

Take your vitamins, or up whatever it is that keeps you running.