{"id":2453,"date":"2017-07-28T17:29:10","date_gmt":"2017-07-28T17:29:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bellagracemagazine.com\/my-not-so-normal-bedtime-routine\/"},"modified":"2023-04-20T18:11:51","modified_gmt":"2023-04-20T18:11:51","slug":"my-not-so-normal-bedtime-routine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bellagracemagazine.com\/blog\/my-not-so-normal-bedtime-routine\/","title":{"rendered":"My Not-So-Normal Bedtime Routine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tWords: Christen Hammons<\/a><\/span>\n\t\n\tPhoto credit: Bekah Russom<\/a><\/span>\n\t<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

All the experts say you shouldn\u2019t do it, but each night I find myself tucked into bed with my cell phone in hand. <\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

While my husband and our pets fall into a deep slumber, I stay up just a little longer, swiping and clicking, hoping to unwind just a bit more. They say I shouldn\u2019t do it, but I ignore them.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I\u2019m not staying up into the late hours of night checking Facebook or Instagram. It\u2019s nothing like that. Instead, I hit the Imgur app, click on the category labeled \u201caww\u201d and spend a few minutes taking it all in. It\u2019s nothing profound, just a simple image-sharing site, but it allows me to easily scroll through all types of photos and internet memes. I turn to it when I need a good laugh, but at night I use it to look at cute pictures and gifs. Most of them are baby animals, and who doesn\u2019t love them? There are also some human babies sprinkled in, and often a story of human kindness appears on my phone screen.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Doing this each night slows my mind down. Instead of thinking of all I didn\u2019t get done that day, or all I need to do the following day, I see a collection of tiny puppies who have fallen asleep in their food, or a cat whose fur color appears to give him a mustache. I chuckle to myself and feel my body relax. It isn\u2019t long before my eyes start involuntarily shutting, telling me it\u2019s time to put my phone down and pull up the covers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never been a rule breaker. If someone tells me I shouldn\u2019t do something, I usually comply. This time, though, I have to disobey the experts. This simple routine brings me more joy than it probably should, but when you find something like that, you need to embrace it. Besides, who doesn\u2019t want to fall asleep with visions of newborn bunnies running through their heads?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  All the experts say you shouldn\u2019t do it, but each night I find myself tucked into bed with my cell phone in hand.   While my husband and our pets fall into a deep slumber, I stay up just a little longer, swiping and clicking, hoping to unwind just a bit more. They say […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":1175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-all"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bellagracemagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bellagracemagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bellagracemagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bellagracemagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bellagracemagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bellagracemagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bellagracemagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bellagracemagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bellagracemagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bellagracemagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}