The one in which a great big lie is debunked

The great, mysterious “they” always told me that I would become a morning person once I had children. I was dubious, to say the least, but I couldn’t help but become a little bit hopeful that “they” spoke the truth.

Newsflash: THEY lied. Lied right through their stupid teeth.

Apparently, they do not know the definition of “morning person”. Katie’s Dictionary defines “morning person” as such:

Morning Person (morn·ing  per·son; noun)  

1.      A person who greets each dawn with a smile and a chim-chiminee kick in their step.

2.      A person who has no trouble waking up from their slumber and takes on their day refreshed and ready.

3.      I hate you.

I really wanted to turn into a morning person. Badly. I have always, always, always been more of a night owl. This has slightly changed since I’ve gotten older and far less capable of the shenanigans I once enjoyed. I look back to my early bad-girl college days and wonder at the fact that me and my girls did not even begin getting ready to go out until roughly 10 p.m. Do you know what 10 p.m. looks like in my life these days? If we are home, 10 p.m. is about the time I start debating whether or not to go to bed. If we are out with friends, 10 p.m. is the time I start trying to catch Dan’s eye so I can send him the “I’m ready if you are (which means let’s go now, ok thanks)” look.

Slight aside, but sometimes husbands can be so dense. Sometimes he pretends not to understand my look and forces me to mouth the words to him and indicate towards the door with my head. And SOMETIMES even that doesn’t work. Sometimes I have to actually vocalize my request and say in front of EVERYONE, “Are you ready to go babe?” Talk about tres embarrassing.

Safe to say I could not really be considered a true “night owl” anymore. But my brain still wants me to be one. I can be very productive in the evenings. I love to sew, read, craft, whatever, at night. I like doing this stuff during the day too, but seeing as how I work and have toddlers, my life isn’t exactly geared towards day-time creation. So now not only is my brain against me being a morning person, my life is against me, too. And you know what that means? Not my fault.

So yeah, there I was, pregnant with my crazy Lucas, hoping against hope that I would become a morning person when he was born. But as I’m sure you can imagine by now, this did not happen. You know what I became instead? An up-all-the-time person. An “I was up with the baby all night and my jerk job still expects me to show relatively close to the ungodly time at which my work commences” person.

Let me clear up this little misunderstanding once and for all. Being awake in the morning does not a morning person make. It just makes you awake. If I had my choice, I would sleep until 10 each day. (And not go to work, but that’s not really the point of this.)       

Going to bed at night is something I look forward to on a pretty regular basis. That moment when I am all brushed, washed and pajamaed, and I fall into bed ready for some sleep action is one of my most favorite moments.

But I try not to think of the mornings. I hate morning. With. A. PASSION. HATEIT. I have added a temp position in addition to my regular job this summer, which requires me to have myself and both kids out the door before my darling husband gets home from work. And unfortunately, this is no easy task.

If you want to talk about a morning person, my Charlie is primo exhibit A. She’s awake most mornings before anyone else, and she is just thuh-rilled to be alive. She literally hits the ground running and does not stop until someone forces her to go to bed at night. If we can get her to stay still long enough in the afternoon, she will usually nap. But no matter what, she is up and at ‘em with no problem. I used to joke (before children – BC) that I would wake my kids up by singing “Rise and shine and give God your glory glory” over and over again. (It was a joke because there is no way in hell that I will be singing any damn thing in the morning, so don’t even ask.) Well, Charlie pretty much epitomizes that song. She rises, she shines, and she gives God her glory glory. And boy is she happy to do it. If it weren’t so cute, it would be utterly annoying.

Lucas, on the other hand….hmmm….how do I describe Lucas in the morning? Well, to put it nicely, he’s his mother’s son.

You know what? I’m going to tell you a little story to give you a very slight idea of what I’m working with when it comes to Lucas. (Because no blog post would be complete without me rambling on in a million different directions through multiple tangents. Or parenthesis. I defy you to try to find one single blog post in which I have not used parenthesis.) When I was younger, my mom and I were in this thing called Indian Maidens, which was run through the YMCA. My two cousins (aka my sisters from another mister) and my aunt were also a part of this organization, and we were in the same tribe. I can't remember the name of our tribe, but my Indian Maiden name was Moonbeam and my mom’s was Babbling Brooke.

Every year, we took a couple trips with the entire Indian Maiden organization. One year, our tribe organized the weekend, and we opted to go to Birch Run Outlets, aka Heaven on Earth. We stayed in a hotel, which was a nice departure from the slightly more rustic amenities our other trips usually had. My mom and I shared a room with my cousins and aunt, and one night, the fire alarm went off.

Now in the spirit of full transparency, I do not remember this. This is only what I have been told, and it has possibly been slightly exaggerated over the years. But *allegedly*, my family TRIED to wake me up without success. So you know what they did? They LEFT me. LEFT ME. In a possibly burning building. Left me to burn. And when they came back (it was a false alarm), I was *allegedly* trying to put my jeans on. My cousin Allison *allegedly* said, “Katie, what are you doing?!” and I *allegedly* answered, “I’m trying to get out of here!” Then they *allegedly* told me that everything was fine, and I went back to bed and fell asleep immediately.

I want you to take two things away from this story. The first is that you can’t trust my cousins, my aunt, OR my very own mother to carry you out of a burning hotel if you won’t wake up. (And they will laugh every time they tell the story of it.) The second is that I sleep very heavily and do not take kindly to waking up.

So you take me, add about 30 bags of rattle snakes, a huge can of tear gas, and one cup of pure, unadulterated rage and you get Lucas in the morning.

Waking Lucas up is akin to terrorist negotiations. It requires a very specific variety of finesse. If you set one teeny, tiny little toenail wrong, you are trucked. I am still navigating the deadly waters of the art that is Waking Up Lucas. Lucas is SO not a morning person. And then you have me. Me, who is also SO not a morning person, but is being forced to become one! The injustice of it all is making me run out of words. There I am, every morning, exhausted because I stayed up too late letting my creative juices flow, and I have to actually be happy and nice and control my temper while I attempt to wake the sleeping bear. And all I really want to do is crawl in bed next to that warm little body and pass out right along with him.

So to the mythical “they” who spout that wisdom of becoming a morning person once you have kids – you better put a sock in it. You are spreading lies and now everyone knows it. Maybe instead of doling out parenting wisdom, you should take up knitting?