I can sleep

I have been really tired, I rested most of the day Saturday and Sunday but still felt really tired. I had a brutal late rugby game under the lights on Sunday which resulted in multiple bruises and a slightly strained neck.  Still I did not sleep well, that night or Monday night.

I read a little bit about sleeping better and I found the trick that seems to work for me.

In Japan we take a hot bath almost every night except in during the summer months. A hot bath is usually pretty relaxing but when your bouncing a 10 month old baby and her louder almost 8 year old brother is yelling his  A, B C's it can be hard to relax.

I read about taking a ice bath to sooth sore muscles and help speed recovery and increase your ability to fall asleep. Draining the tub to refill it with cold water every night is not really a option either. So my solution was after passing the baby off to Mom and kicking out the 8 soon to be year old I did the following:

1. Returned to the hot bath and relaxed for a short time, maybe 3 - 5 minutes.
   
2. Turned on the shower and progressively made it colder over the course of 5 or 6 minutes to the point at which is was very cold and made the soreness in my neck go away. 
3. Took the baby upstairs and put her in bed with a bottle, then immediately got into my bed and tried to sleep.

The results were amazing I slept pretty much from 9 pm till 4 am, then easily fell back asleep and slept straight through till 730 am. I felt like I was getting sick again the night before and when I woke up I felt much better. Unfortunately I think that I will not be able to use this trick every night. There is simply too much studying or other things I need to do in order to get stuff done on time, but man was it nice to get a really really deep sleep for so many hours straight.