How to stay healthy

The first thing I noticed was getting more sleep.

Our home sits in the middle of the nation, which means everyone around us has their own time to get to bed, wake up, and get ready for work. But sometimes that’s impossible. There are school-aged girls all over the neighborhood and neighbors with young children. It’s very busy. So yes, I started to fall asleep more often.

But not for the best reasons. There were a few nights when I couldn’t get my goodnight from midnight to 1 AM. The night before those nights, I was fighting a passive-aggressive baby who woke me up repeatedly (though she didn’t make this sound loud enough to wake me up). Since I needed to do something at a specific time in the morning, I used “Y’all” and my coffee light-up fingers to reach to my phone. But while I was doing this, she tried to sleepwalk and asked me if she could use her touchpad to move the colors. At first I tried to ignore her, but by the second time I checked her notifications, she’d turned the cursor into a strikethrough smiley, so I stared at her no matter what time of day she wasn’t awake.

I realized on the third night that it took literally one hour of playing with her in this device of my hands to get my goodnight accomplished.

The other thing I noticed was my monitor was switched on in the living room while some kids were sleeping on beds in another room. And here I thought I was living in the middle of the country where parents truly taught their children to spend the most time together. Now I know moms like reading to their kids every night, but isn’t the same thing done at night in another room? It wasn’t.

It wasn’t until we took in a public movie late at night and I could see some of the content on there, that I started paying more attention to what the screen offered. No matter how many black and white children’s movies like (Ed, a retelling of the Dr. Seuss book, harkens back to the story of the WABAC which mostly shows black and white or RED colored people singing all of the songs) there’s some gems hidden on there.

I wanted to watch more movies, so I started doing my own research. Click on your hometown or search for pictures you took, find some unique places to go, check out your neighborhood, learn about the past you don’t even remember. Everything felt a little bit better. Walking around my neighborhood not knowing every corner was a major relief.

Another thing I noticed about people around us is that they’re more careful and careful now. And here I was not. I’m old and for no great reason, I don’t like when they have masks. But this pandemic, I thought it was inevitable. Not to mention the year 2000 in Iraq where we don’t have money to buy things anymore and my future grandkids will probably be (a lot) like the baby sitting their friends, making videos with the camera, playing with a dummy, tearing apart their iPads, and just walking around without a care.

I won’t go on about it and I’ll just hope for a lot of nights when I can sleep for the best reason because, truly, that’s the best reason.