The War of Sleep

    I have been married to my wife for 15 years. The most common thing we fight about is the TV in the bedroom. I never had one in my bedroom growing up (except for a summer or two). She had one on constantly in her room growing up. Our first house we had a TV in the bedroom, because we had extra TVs from consolidating things. She has works for the government so has to be at work at 9 and has a short commute. I have to be at work at 8, a lot of times, and have had commutes over an hour half the time. I have also had to travel extensively for long durations throughout the country with, of course, early alarm times of 3:30 a.m., etc. This problem has even been brought up in therapy, the therapist even seeming surprised that she would continually disrupt my sleep when I ask her not to. PLUSssss, when I go to the gym I wake up at 5:20 a.m. and I HAVE to have 8 hours of sleep, so I have to be asleep by 9:20 and not be woken up. And I am a light sleeper. She is a heavy sleeper, one night I came home from a Chicago project early, and I couldn't even get her to wake up with the doorbell.  

    In the new house, I stupidly installed a new TV in the bedroom. My fault. She would keep the thing on all night. I would enable the sleep timer/auto off and she would disable it. I took the cable box, disconnected it and hid it. That worked for a while. 

    Then she got an iPad. She would bring the iPad to bed and leave it going half the night. So, I would have "Real Housewives" playing a foot from my head in bed when she had it near my side "because she had to switch sides." I would sometimes wake up and then just push the home button, so Siri would come on, pause the video, and then the iPad would eventually go dark/quiet. I would also log into the router and block her iPad until the video turned off. This still cuts into my sleep when I need it most. The old cruddy Spectrum modem/router's internet scheduling did not work.

    So finally, I bought a new router, and modem. Synology. Great router w/ lots of features. Keep in mind, I don't tell her a word about these great features on restricting internet access and she's not good w/ tech. I restricted access on my 6-year-old's iPhone after bedtime, etc. as a test. So yesterday, I did the same to the wife's iPad. After 11, the internet is cut off to her iPad. So great waking up last night to use the bathroom and not having Andy Cohen blaring in my ear. 

 

    She will probably start taking her phone and using it as a hotspot or to play video. I'm going to have to figure out my next move.

 

TL;DR My wife has messed up my sleep for years w/ TV. I finally got revenge with a new router. A modern version of Dahl's 'The Twits'