The Importance of Being Rested

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I am NOT a morning person.
In the past I've been able to train myself to wake up early when necessary but if I'm left to my own devices I naturally will default to staying up too late and dreading the sunrise.

Of course, there have been times when my preference (or my tendency I suppose) just didn't matter one bit, for example high school. Classes started at 8 am or whatever, and I had to be there on time. That's not saying there weren't times I was late. I was also pretty ecstatic when we had to split time on one campus with our rival high school because of earthquake damage to our school and we got to go to school at lunchtime. Those were good times.

But I digress. I've held jobs that start WAY early, both the bakery AND summer camp started at 6 am. As did before school day care. But I've ALSO had jobs that required me to be up until the wee hours of the morning, mostly newspaper jobs. I learned to deal with either scenario.

Now that I have three kids, one of whom is in kindergarten in the morning, it is becoming readily apparent that I have to enter into a phase of time management restructuring, again.

Despite the fact that the nighttime is the right time for so many things (silence, solitude, great TV) I'm going to have to give all those things up in favor of an early bedtime so I can handle the early wake-up whisperings of my soon to be 6 year old telling me that her grandmother can't take her to school that morning and she has to leave, uh, like NOW!

Or alternatively, so I will have enough good quality sleep on my head when the (no longer really a baby) baby decides that he's topped out at 5 am and really WOULD like to get out of bed and eat waffles, uh, like NOW!

Or when the inevitable happens and my husband is finally able to find work and he and my mom are both out of the house by 7:30 am for work and SOMEONE has to get up to supervise the kids and the dog, lest there be another "incident".

Bottomline, Christmas vacation really spoiled me and having my mom here as a morning facilitator for Elizabeth has REALLY spoiled me and before I get too complacent (which inevitably will lead to the destruction of this carefully crafted system in which I wake up at 8:30 even though my kid starts school at 8 am) I have to become prepared to once again shoulder it all on my own.

It's a good thing that I've already stockpiled coffee.