Do you believe food cravings are an accurate indication of something the body needs? I’m not sure where I sit on this one. I do know that about once a month I’ll wake in the middle of the night and want one thing: chocolate. Not a lot of chocolate, but not anything else except chocolate (and washed down with ice cold milk, natch!). I’ve solved this “problem”, if you can call it that, by laying in bed and thinking, Can I fall back asleep or no? before finally getting up, heading to the kitchen, and dipping into the bag of Ghiradelli chips I have in the pantry. About a dozen pieces usually satisfies.
I did almost nothing of note during the day yesterday – I am attempting to rest and recover from a nasty bout of tonsillitis. As a result, after my 4:30 AM chocolate wake-up, my body is completely rested and sleep eludes me. I’d been plagued by horrid, inane dreams: hand-basting fabric layers that frayed incessantly and wouldn’t line up. The kind of over-involved, persnickety nightmares that incorporate a low-level anxiety and that I typically attribute to fever or illness.
I wash my drinking glass then head back upstairs (I am not so virtuous as to brush my teeth after eating midnight sweets) to slip back into clean sheets next to my seven year old daughter. I notice the little bed at the foot of our king size bed is empty; my son Nels has at some point joined us. He is sleeping with his tummy velcro’d to his sister’s back; I pull him close and he rolls over. I stroke his smooth nut-brown thigh for a while, an activity that often calms us both at bedtime. Not that he needs calming; he is dead to the world. It feels like the heat from yesterday only dissipated a few hours and is back on again; I expect another hot day today that I’ll be spending some effort hiding from.