This morning we had a ridiculously early start to the day. Now some of you may be aware that I am not what you would call a morning person. I’m not really a night person either. I like to think of myself as a lunch time person. I was, after all, born at lunch time ish. There are conflicting reports of my birth actually but somewhere between 11.45 am and 1.45 pm I made my appearance. I call that lunch time.
Some of you people will be of the opinion that there is nothing better than getting up at the crack of dawn or even starting the day before the sun has risen. You argue that there is nothing more glorious than a sunrise viewed with coffee in hand to awaken the senses. I can agree that there is nothing more glorious than a sunrise (I have been forced to watch a few in my time) but I would be much happier if they happened at lunch time thank you very much.
In a perfect Nomie world the day wouldn’t begin until lunch time and would end right after dinner. I know we wouldn’t get much done but think of all the sleep we’d get.
Anyway James has spent most of his life trying to convince himself that he’s a morning person. He is most definitely not. He’s a night person with an annoying tendency to fake being a morning person on occasion. Now if he were a real morning person he would go to bed relatively early and then rise with the birds. If he did the rising with the birds part quietly my world would be almost perfect. Unfortunately he’s so clumsy first thing in the morning that even if he tries to get up without waking me it kind of falls flat when he trips over yesterday’s clothes, turns a light on anywhere within a 100 meter radius of the bed, or has a coughing fit while dropping dishes into the sink. His tendency to stay up really late totally does me in by the end of the week. His problem is that he has the ability to run on very little sleep for short periods of time, after which he collapses for a few days.
But I digress, this morning he set the alarm for 4 am. Now you can imagine how excited I was about this. He did have a semi good reason for it which was that he had to get to the airport and catch a flight for work. I had asked him last night what time his flight was and he told me 8.30 and that he needed to get there an hour ahead of time. He figured we needed to leave the house no later than 5 am to allow time for traffic and coffee purchasing.
I managed to ignore the alarm at first and clung with a steely grip to my sleep while he got up and readied himself. Even though we had got all the washing done and folded for him the night before he had insisted that he didn’t need to actually pack until the morning so he went downstairs to do this. After a while I noticed that it was very quiet downstairs and I wondered if he had fallen asleep on the couch. I spent a few conflicted moments pondering the evils of letting the waves of sleepiness take me away to dreamland again and letting him sleep too but my better judgement told me that I would regret it for longer than it was worth when he missed the flight and blamed me for it.
I got out of bed and stumbled to the bathroom. I figured I didn’t need to dress for the day since I planned on coming straight home for a soothing shower after dropping the kids at school. Also that way I was able to make the most of my sleep time and not waste a precious moment in toiletries that no one was going to appreciate at that time of the day.
I sleepwalked out of my room to see James rousing the kids. Kaitlyn leapt out of bed and after seeing that it was still pitch dark outside she said “but Daddy, its still nighttime and I’m still tired”. I could totally relate to this sentiment. It was at that point that I mentioned to James that we had better hurry since it was now closing in on 5 am, the time he had stated we needed to be in the car. He smiled (or smirked) and said that actually it was 5.30 that we had to leave by. Then he blocked the way so that I wouldn’t be able to make it back to the bed.
We did manage to get in the car by 5.30. The kids were all dressed for school and had their backpacks and snacks with them. I noticed that James hadn’t pulled the wheeliebin and recycling tubs in from the curb so I made him stop and do it then and there. When he tried to complain I reminded him that we had plenty of time. That’ll teach him to try hoodwinking me again!!
We stopped to get coffee at which point I was having a sneezing fit. I tried to explain to James that clearly I was severely allergic to being up this early and needed to go home instantly but it didn’t work. We were on our way. At that point I gave up, put my head back and went back to sleep.
In no time at all James was prodding me awake and telling me that we had arrived. I was not done with the sleeping but I woke up anyway. I looked at the clock on the dashboard and then at James and he said “we got her a bit quicker than I thought we would” with a slightly sheepish look in his eyes. I couldn't believe my eyes. It was only 6.30 in the morning a full hour before he was supposed to be there. That was a whole hour more sleep that I could have enjoyed in my bed. I was not altogether impressed about this, especially since he’d kept me up late the night before meaning that I had got less than 5 hours of proper sleep.
Fortunately he was happy to be kicked out onto the curb so we were able to get back on the road pretty quickly. This time I made him tell me the real road number I was to follow in order to get home. Last time he had told me the wrong number and not only was it different to the one I was supposed to go on it was also one that doesn’t exist in this part of the country. I managed to get rather lost.
I decided driving slowly was the best way to go. I really didn't feel fully awake yet (in fact I’m struggling to feel awake now, hours later). Actually I think I was technically still asleep. I have proof. You know that crusty stuff that accumulates in the corners of your eyes while you sleep? Well I had cleared my eyes of this stuff as I drove away from James at the airport but I swear there was more of the stuff accumulating on the drive home even though I was practically inhaling the coffee James had got me earlier.
I got myself into one of the middle lanes (the safest place when occasionally the right hand lane suddenly and unexpectedly turns itself into an exit only lane) and found myself trailing a truck that said ‘Prepared Foods/Marinated Specialties’ on the back. I’m not sure I was ready to think about marinated specialties at that time of the morning but the truck was driving rather slowly and I thought it was safer if I did so too. I followed that truck most of the way home and tried not to imagine what kind of marinated specialities lay inside its refrigerated belly. It finally turned off and I had to quicken my pace so I wouldn’t annoy my fellow motorists. I figured they all had somewhere important to be whereas I was trying to figure out what to do with these kids when we got home. I had planned to drop them straight at school but now we had over an hour to kill and I knew that if I executed my dream plan involving me falling facedown onto the nearest soft thing and immediately reclaiming my lost sleep that I would awake to a house of horrors.
We arrived home before 7.30 but not before taking two calls from James during which he tried to justify the early hour of our departure. In one call he stated that we had, in fact, been stuck in a traffic jam while I slept on the way in. That didn’t really help him at all. If we were stuck in a traffic jam then the fact that we still managed to get there an hour early was proof that we hadn’t needed to leave so early and that we may well have avoided the traffic jam and got there even quicker had we waited and left later.
The second time he was marvelling at the fact that I was still quite a ways from home (he can track me via GPS using my phone). I explained that his tracking device was clearly not working since I was at that moment trying to navigate the exit that lies less than a mile from our house. I also stated that I now had to entertain three very awake children for over an hour while feeling as if I was moving around like a deep sea diver. Then he explained that it was a good thing he had gotten there early since he had had a lot of trouble getting through security because his very ordinary sounding name made the officers think that maybe he was a middle eastern terrorist who had chosen an ordinary sounding name so as to blend into the US culture. If only they would open their eyes and see that he is an orange haired American. Probably doesn’t help that he travels with all sorts of computers and gadgets and wires. They recommended that next time he travels he books using his middle initial. His distracting story didn’t work though, he was still calling me over an hour before his flight time.
So here I sit, coffee in hand (onto my third cup now), the children are safely deposited at school and the baby is napping. I can feel my body perking up as the clock ticks around to the peak of my day. I was born for this. It is nearly lunch time.
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