27 September 2009

What time is it again?

This has to be one of the more annoying aspects of young family life - I am awake at 4:30 AM.  Not 2 or 3 AM, at which point I could coax myself back to bed and sleep; nor 5 or 6 AM, when I could simply be awake.  No - 4:30, which may be one of the silliest times in existence.

And the weird part is, I can't even figure out why I'm awake.  Sometimes, there's a bit of logic - like I had to nurse Elsie.  But she's asleep, and I'm wide awake.  It could be that the low battery on our smoke detector woke me, but I prefer to adopt a more complex and emotionally satisfying explanation - there must be something wrong with someone.  Someone must be sick or injured or near death's door and my strong intuition has wakened me to worry.  How kind of it.  Or - and here's my current favorite - our house may shortly be attempted to be entered by robbers and I woke up in time to foil their attempt by locking all of the bolts on the rear and front doors.  Aha!  Of course, if someone really wanted to break into our house, I don't think that a bolt would prevent it.  However, I do my part in making sure that it appears as undesirable as possible from the outside.  Like hanging up my skivvies on a makeshift laundry line outside the back door.

I am reminded of Anne Shirley, heroine of L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables and subsequent books.  I practically devoured these when I was younger, and I could certainly appreciate Anne's flair for the dramatic.  She would romanticize about nursing her best ("bosom") friend, Diana Barry, back to health from the brink of death, and then dying herself in the process.  I wished so much for a bosom friend whom I could nurse back to health... but I wasn't so keen about the dying bit.  I still have too much work to do here to kick the bucket!



And it reminds me of another instance of awakeness - which I'm sure my poor Gramma can recall with perfect clarity... I won't go into it now, but it involved a big hairy spider (which I can't stand), a stupid mourning dove, and a proposed trip to Meijer in the middle of the night.

So I'm going to go change the battery in that smoke detector and get back to sleep.  Good morning!

1 comment: