OK, so I’m a morning person now. Not by choice, mind you, by coercion. Hubby and I were married eleven years before Monkey came along. We decided to wait a sensible six years before jumping in parenthood, but then were unpleasantly surprised with the five years of infertility that followed. But we had plenty of years to become set in our ways.

My natural inclination, in sleep patterns, is to stay up late at night and sleep late in the morning. Even though sleeping really late on work days was impossible, I still slept as late as possible, pushing the limits of how fast I could get ready for work. This is where my infamous lead foot came in real handy. You see, I like to drive fast and I’m not a timid driver (I once faced down a Chicago city bus and won). But on the weekends, ah sweet slumber, Hubby and I would sleep until 11 am or noon.

My parents, bless their hearts, would often ask “When are you two going to start going to church?” I never did tell them that going to church would seriously cut into my sleeping-late time and I was just too lazy to go and then there was that whole baptist-church-scarred-me-for-life thing, but I digress.

For eleven years it was just the two of us, living the life teenagers only dream about. No parents to tell us what to do, no overwhelming responsibilities, the freedom to just find a new job if the old one didn’t fit my schedule, the freedom to go where we wanted when we wanted. We would occasionally get up and go places on the spur of the moment: Branson, Dallas, Eureka Springs. But mostly we just slept late.

And then, five and a half years ago, that all changed. Monkey was born and I haven’t had more than a handful of peaceful nights’ sleep since. And the only times I get to sleep in are when we take the kids out to stay with my folks overnight. Once, when Monkey was still a small-to-middling infant, he let me sleep until 9am. We all would’ve slept later, but some kind of internal mom-alarm went off, I jerked out of sleep on my own, freaked out when I looked at the clock, and sprinted into Monkey’s room convinced that something was wrong. Nope, the little fella was peacefully sleeping, but of course I couldn’t go back to sleep. Adrenaline was pumping through  my veins and my heart was pounding so hard that it kept threatening to push its way out of my chest.

Anyway, we always figured that the kids would eventually settle into our pattern of sleeping. After all, they come from two very confirmed night owls, why shouldn’t they just immediately take to staying up later and sleeping in? I’ll tell ya why not, because fate has a cruel streak.

To my kids, if the sun is up so are they. Light outside, even just the faintest pinking at the eastern edge of the sky, and it’s party time! Well, they have gotten a little better since those days, but still. I’m lucky if I get to sleep until 7:30. If one of them sleeps later than that, the other one won’t. Take this morning for instance. Monkey probably would’ve slept later than 8 o’clock, but Pumpkin had other ideas. I still have a monitor in her room, so at 7:30, bang on the dot, I hear “Mama! I’m ready to get out now!” “MAMA!!!! MAMA!!!!” The monitor made it sound like she was screaming in my ear. So I went and retrieved her for no other reason than to Make. The. Yelling. Stop.

Anyway, she disturbed Monkey, who probably needed to sleep a lot later than he did. And now I’m watching Tom and Jerry at 9:00 on a Saturday morning when I would much rather still be sleeping.

Someday, they’ll be teenagers who want to do nothing else but sleep until noon. But I’m afraid I won’t get to enjoy it, by then they’ll have me turned into a real morning person. You know the kind, the one’s who say stuff like, “Oh yeah, I got up 5 o’clock this morning and got all my housework and laundry done. Then I weeded the garden and did the grocery shopping!” Let’s hope, for everyone’s sake, that they don’t succeed at that.