Cave Transformation

So tonight I undertook "Cave" transformation... or shall I say creating caves. I went out to the store to buy some black out curtains for our room and our daughters room. I had done some online searches and saw that Walmart, Target and Anna's Linens carried them. Since we have a Walmart here in town I thought I'd check there first. Needless to say I was super pleased to find black curtains which will match the one set that already does a great job of "blacking-out" in our room and even found the exact number of panels in "Eclipse Kids" in a lovely purple color for our daughters room. I thought I was going to have to get two sets for her room a plain white black out set and some pretty pink or purple set so she wouldn't necessarily catch on to my blacking out her room plans. I came home and proceeded to begin installing said black-out curtains (forgot to mention the curtain rods I also purchased)

It was super tempting to just screw the mounts into the wall, I always hate drilling the holes putting the little plastic do-hickey's in, then screwing in the mounts, but I wanted to do it right since I imaged the blackout curtains were probably pretty weighty and we had two panels per rod since our windows are something like 77 inches across in each bedroom. I did it the long, strenuous, "Right" way all by myself. At one point I was getting super frustrated and somewhat tired from the manual screwing (stupid brackets didn't really allow enough room for the power tool to get in there and do the job) then I just sort of channeled my inner momma bear and grunted and got it done. It sure felt good to go into each room, turn off the lights and take inventory of any other sources of light.

We had given our daughter an alarm clock several months back, not because she needs it to wake up with, but instead because sometimes she wakes up entirely too early!! (especially on the weekends) It is really amazing how bright everything else becomes when your room is pitch black. So I unplugged her clock and took it out of her room completely and she also had a little CD player/radio that had a red display light which quickly lit up the whole room... unplugged that too. She's been at her mom's for the last couple of weeks for summer vacation... so my plan was to have her blackout curtains up when she returned, in hopes that maybe she won't so much notice the pitch black darkness of her room, but more just the normal adjustment period of getting use to your room again when you've been sleeping elsewhere for a couple of weeks. One thing that I really noticed when I tested out the darkness... she's got glow in the dark stars and paint all over her ceiling and BOY HOWDY!! Those stars glow BRIGHT when you first turn off the lights. Hopefully that will give her enough light to feel comfortable and fall asleep.

I can't wait to test out our room tonight. I mean I am a professional sleeper as it is... I am out like a light about 2 minutes (or less) of my head hitting the pillow, but I do get up several times a night to go potty. I read somewhere that often times it's not really that we need to get up so much as something else wakes us and then we get up. I noticed that our neighbors security light goes off right outside our window probably hundreds of times a night, it picks up when a car drives down the street so its on again, off again constantly. I am hoping that the addition of these black out curtains will eliminate any sleep disturbance created by that security light. My hubby is a much lighter sleeper, so I am also hopeful that the blackout curtains will bring him a full, peaceful, deep, restful nights sleep.

Cave no. 1 and Cave no. 2 are ready and waiting. The next step in our primal/paleo lifestyle is complete. :)