Six AM For Dummies

I hate getting up early. This likely is directly proportional to my enduring love for staying up late. However, with the whole six kids thing and all, it has been increasingly apparent to me that my time is really not my own. When they’re up, it’s theirs. Sure, I got a desk off Craigslist a few months back  (awesome red one) and can now work upstairs in our bedroom where I am at least not in the direct line of traffic, but this still has a couple of disadvantages mainly relating to the fact that children are such children.

What usually happens is one of two things: I close my door and work upstairs for a little bit and they open it right back up and waltz in with dollies, bionicles, Cheerios and whatever else they have managed to pick up for their daily household item relocation project at that moment. Then they sit on my bed or eighteen inches away from me at the floor to play or talk or fight. This entirely defeats the purpose of having a desk away from the main floor.

So eventually I shoo them back out and tell them to go clean their rooms or something. This works for a few minutes and then either Kyra takes something or Georgie starts bossing people around or Faith won’t eat her breakfast and they all start yelling at one another. Or they’re all quiet for a lovely amount of time and when I go downstairs I find that they have taken out every single toy they own and built a city where the kitchen floor used to be or trucked out every stitch of bedding to build an impassible wall in the hallway. Then the noise comes from me!

None of these solutions are great. After long days of re-cleaning messes in places that were cleaned half an hour before; laundering clothing for a houseful of people; fighting with my checkbook; kissing fingers with small, nearly invisible owies on them; and hugging and smooching several charming children and one husband, I tend to want to decompress at the end of the day and not spend the evening working. The only place to add more hours to my day was in the morning.

Alarm clocks are stupid, loud, and I have a really terrible habit of slapping them until they shut up and then promptly rolling back over to sleep for just a couple more hour-length minutes. If I’m going to get up early, I have to figure out how to fix this. Last week I found this article about How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Clock Goes Off. The guy who writes the blog is one strange, anti-religious duck; however, he does seem to have a plausible solution to my alarm aversion.

Last night I set my alarm for 6am (my first thought was 5, but then I decided I didn’t want to give myself a total heart attack and it was 12:30am already). After running through in my head a few times how the alarm would sound, how I would sit straight up, turn off the alarm, take a deep breathe and stretch, and then pop right up and go take a shower, I zonked out.

Six o’ clock came and that is exactly what I did: sit up, breathe, stretch, pop up, shower. I think this may have been made slightly easier by the fact that I used the alarm on my cell phone which is really loud and sounds like a phone and it scared the crap out of me. Actually, I think who it really startled was George who I had not directly mentioned my experiment to. He showed up in the shower about ten minutes later.

I’m planning to try this whole six o’ clock thing through the rest of January and see how it goes. Then I’ll either try moving it back an hour or will give up in disgust and go back to my lazy ways. So far it is now 8:44 and I’ve been up for nearly three hours. This is going to be my lead for next week’s GNGC edition, so now I don’t have to worry about that next week. Yay!

I’ve already organized bills stuff for this week and am generally enjoying having had some time to hear myself think before the swarming masses wake up and crowd out whatever conversation myself and I were having.

Ahh, and here’s swarmers #1 and #3. Guess it’s about time to go. Ha! We have a little bit of snow again this morning (under 1″). Georgie’s reaction: “Oh no! Not again!” What kid reacts to snow like that? Apparently one who spent two weeks stuck in the house.

Rachel