On a school morning, no combination of alarm clocks, barking dogs and barking parents could possibly rouse our sleepy brood of children.
To get them moving, we’ve resorted to drill sergeant-like chants: “Feet on the floor and out the door!” “Wakey wakey, eggs and bakey!” “Rise and shine! Shine and rise!”
We’re usually answered with a series of grunts and grumbles. It doesn’t matter if it’s the 16-year-old or the 2-year-old.
It is safe to say that, in our house, we’re not morning people.
And it’s like that every day of the year. It’s a real struggle to get people moving and starting their day.
Except the two weeks of Christmas vacation. Then, 6 a.m. is the new 10 a.m.
It’s genuinely baffling. It doesn’t matter how late they stayed up the night before. The simple need to not wake up somehow gives them the power to wake up earlier. (We won’t even talk about the 4:30 a.m. attempt to wake everyone up Christmas morning.)
Another guarantee is one child can’t possibly wake up just one adult and call it a day. No, once that rooster starts crowing, it won’t be happy until all the animals in the barnyard are moving too, including the grumpiest cats and the grouchiest grouses.
It certainly doesn’t matter how much we didn’t need to wake up early that morning. I’ve been filling in more on nights at the newspaper recently, meaning I generally don’t get home until after midnight (a stretch that mercifully ended Saturday night). That really seems to guarantee that the children all want to bounce around as far before sunrise as they possibly can when I’d prefer a few more minutes to snooze.
It’s not like there’s that much to make them excited, either. Usually about an hour after they wake up, they’re already telling us how bored they are. Apparently the sleigh-full of gifts Santa brought recently aren’t quite enough to keep them occupied for more than half an hour in a row.
The real shame is we know that Tuesday is coming, when we begin mourning our mornings again. We’ll return to those 6:30 a.m. wake-ups to get the children ready for school and daycare again.
And when it happens, we know we’ll be back to our old routines, maybe even missing those magical two weeks when everyone woke up earlier than we wanted without complaint.
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