Mornings - Bah!

I'm a professed night owl. I dislike mornings. I dislike getting up early. I would much rather stay up until midnight or later & sleep in a bit. In fact during my freshman year of college I specifically set up my schedule to allow for this. I even included a night class!

I'm now okay with getting up any time from 7am on. However, I have three boys. ALL are morning kids. They get up rather easily. My hubby is a morning person. Ugh. There is absolutely nothing worse for a night owl like myself to see such a smiling happy face in the morning - trust me on this.

Apparently, I am not the only one out there to suffer from such cheerful people or from the difficulty of fitting in with said happy, cheerful ::shudder:: morning people.

In fact, one such person even went so far as to give those of us who like the night time a name for our "disease" - Morning Grumpus Syndrome. Of course, my hubby reads his blog so he has been enjoying pointing this out to me - almost every single morning. ::sigh::

And poor Kathy over at the Duckabush blog has been talking about her struggle with the morning for quite some time. I've been secretly agreeing but not saying much - until now.

You see, I have been wrestling with the idea of ::gasp!!:: changing my ways. Trust me when I say this can only be from God. Given the chance, there is no way I would be working on this. This has been on my mind for well over a year. I want to have a more consistent quite time with the Lord. Every time I turn around I keep feeling like I need to get up BEFORE the kids to do this. My kids are up EARLY - as in no later than 6am most mornings. I've tried keeping them in bed later but it hasn't worked really well. The only solution I can see if for ME to get up before them which means no later than 5am so I can exercise (i.e. wake-up & function) & have a half hour for quiet time. Did you see those two little letters after that number? AM as in MORNING! Five in the morning? By choice? That's just nuts I tell you - nuts!

However, every time I sit down to see the things I want to get done in the day - including exercise & quite time - oh yeah - and school with the boys! - I have to start that early. I so do NOT want to do this. I even went so far as to create a schedule to see how I could break up all that time in the day to use each hour to its full potential.

• 5am - Exercise
• 5:30 - Quiet time/Bible study
• 6am - Make breakfast
• 6:30 - Eat breakfast
• 7am - Shower
• 7:30 - Morning chores
• 8am - School

Those are the things I want to do each morning. Those are the things that should be my top priority. Unfortunately, this is what my day tends to look like.

• 6:30 - Drag myself out of bed
• 6:45 - Blearily walk around the kitchen putting together hubby's lunch (if he hasn't already left & done it himself) & make myself breakfast. The kiddos end up with granola bars/cereal bars most days.
• 7:00 - Sit at the table & eat breakfast while reading - not typically the Bible - just the newest fiction book.
• 7:30 - I may or may not start exercising at this point. I probably say to myself, "Just one more chapter" & sit for another hour. Now you all know why I have such a long list of books completed!
• 10am - Finally start school.
• 11:30am - Lunch
• 1pm - Try to finish school & avoid the PC so I don't get sucked in for a few hours of "checking e-mail."

::sigh:: When the Lord slams a 2x4 alongside your head, it's time to listen. I've been setting my alarm all week to get up at 5am. I haven't made it yet, but I am getting up at 6am. It's all a start right?

Of course, tomorrow I WILL have to be up at 5am. I signed my oldest son (age 11) up to do the one-day class at TeenPact. The class itself is from 9-3pm & we need to be there by 8:45. That's not too bad until I started to figure in the extra time I needed to get to my sister's house to drop off the two little boys to spend the day. Since my sister lives a half hour from the state capital, I have to figure in that drive time, plus time to drop them off, chat for a bit, etc. & so on. All that means we have to leave our house by 6:30AM. That's when I usually get UP in the morning.

I am so not looking forward to all of that, but I do know that we will have a good time & my kiddo will learn a lot about the legislature and government - things he's been asking about lately. Be looking for a blog update sometime over the weekend.