Tomorrow Morning

I talked to my brother earlier today. I told him I only had an hour left to work. And that the first thing I was looking forward to was sleeping in tomorrow morning. Because this gets to be my reality from now on! I choose my hours, I choose the time that I sleep and I choose when I work. I don't know that I've ever had those choices. Ever! There has always been someone in control of my daily life. And now ... there is not. Whee doggies!

Jim laughed at me. The idea of working until 3 am is not appealing to him. He likes to wake up at 5 am and get to work. You know, it's so weird. When we were growing up, Jim was always in bed early. Mom never really had to argue with him to get him to bed by 8 pm. When we go over to his house for holidays, by 10:00, Jim has turned into a pumpkin. He quits talking and pretty soon, doesn't even say goodnight, but goes to bed.

If I'm foolish enough to sleep on their couch, I am awakened at 6:00 or so when he can stand it no longer and heads to the kitchen to start working on breakfast. Most mornings, though, he's polite enough to head to his office and work on stuff until 7:30. At that point, we're all fair game.

The first Christmas in their new house - maybe 6 or 7 years ago, Max and I showed up really late on Christmas eve after doing services at church. Matthew was still pretty young and was quite excited. He had stayed up waiting for us to pull in and we did - about 1:30 in the morning. We unloaded the gifts and Max headed downstairs to find a bed to crash on. Matthew and I hung out in a couple of recliners they had upstairs. We tried and tried and tried to go to sleep. But, no such luck. He was so excited, he couldn't shut up! It had been a lot of years since I'd pulled an all-nighter and I was very thankful that Christmas came early that year. I definitely had a nap.

I am not a morning person. In one of my first jobs, I had to be at work at 8:30. I was pretty young and was working as a Christian Ed and Music Director at Spencer Grace UMC in Iowa. The rest of the staff finally figured it out that I was useless until 9:00. So, I took my mail (this was long before email) and a soda into the my office and no one bothered me.

Mom used to argue with me about it. She told me that if I was awake, I needed to be pleasant. I informed her that it wasn't my choice to be awake. That didn't go over well. I learned to be much more pleasant. At least on the outside.

For the last 6 months I've had to be at work by 7:00 am - Max and I are at one vehicle and he needed to be at work by 7:30. The only good thing about that was the amount of work I could get done before anyone else got to the office and the fact that I had at least an hour by myself so I had an hour to get nice before I had to talk to anyone.

Tomorrow morning? I'm not getting up. And I'm not getting up early any day this next week. I have a lot to do around the house, but I'm going to do it in my own time. This is going to be awesome!