Soleil

I hate weekday mornings.  Waking up has always been a torturous thing for me.  Even as a little kid, I was specially exempt from naptime at pre-school because it was so hard for me to have a quick nap and then get up again.  As I aged, I became notorious for my ability to sleep until eight minutes before school started.  My mom tried everything: singing me good morning songs, being gentle and encouraging, beign stern, yelling up the stairs, but nothing worked.  She used to holler up to ask if I was awake and I would sit up, throw the covers off, yell back "I'm up", and then lay down again and fall back asleep. This is a legacy I'm not sure I will ever be able to shed. Even for my birthday this past summer, my mom got a real kick out of buying me a coffee mug that says something about hating mornings. 

Now that I am on my own, I do the best I can.  I try (and almost always fail) to get to bed on time.  I set my alarm for earlier so that I can snooze it without making myself terribly late. I make my lunch the night before so that I have less to do in the morning and can sleep a few minutes longer.

I have noticed that it is markedly harder for me to rouse myself in the winter months, when daylight comes only after I have to be up and out the door.  My latest attempt is based on an alarm clock I heard about that is designed to simluate the sunrise, thereby tricking your body into gently waking up instead of having to be jolted by an obnoxious alarm clock. It starts with a gradually brightening light that begins before you have to wake up and continues to brighten until eventually an alarm goes off. 

So, not wanting to buy a large, ugly, and possibly expensive gadgety alarm clock, I decided to buy a lamp timer (like the ones people use when they go on vacation) and set it to turn a lamp on across the room about 1/2 hour before my alarm goes off.  After a few false starts, I finally got it to work today.  It was okay.  But seriously, I still hate mornings.  That's probably not going to change.