Counting Sheep. Or Not.

When I first got married, was working for our family business and really just starting to understand the word "stress", I was telling my Brit Dad about how much trouble I had falling asleep at night. Nighttime is when all the worries and stresses of day to day living creep up into the front of my mind, magnify themselves a zillion times and keep me from finding my way to dreamland.


Dad sympathized with me and told me a little trick he and my Mom used to go to sleep at night (get your minds out of the gutter-this is a clean blog, so far!). They would play an alphabet game. It would be so boring and would get your mind to focus on something other than your worries. Being that my Dad was in the Royal Navy he liked to play a version of the game where you create odd, most likely rejected, names of Battleships, say instead of the USS Destroyer you'd have the USS Retreat or the USS Coward. You start with 'A' names and work your way through the alphabet, usually finding you don't make it to 'Z' before you are well into dreamland. 


Much more entertaining than counting sheep, don't you think?

We have come up with alternate versions of the game, like for example: name a city in your state for every letter of the alphabet.  Or leave out the alphabet altogether, there are 46 counties in SC, I try to name them all and that usually puts me right to sleep. Or, name a college/university beginning with every letter of the alphabet. The list goes on, however, the battleship version is the most entertaining and sleep inducing, in my opinion.


How about you, do ya'll have special tricks that help you shut down your brains and get to sleep? Besides sex?? :) Because, quite frankly, that does NOT put me to sleep... ;-p (oh, come on, you know if I hadn't said it someone would have!)