Morning is My Time

Claudia Schmidt is a morning person, and she makes it sound really wonderful. Read more from Claudia on her blog, My Left Breast.

I love getting up early in the morning on the weekends.

Let me rephrase that.  I hate getting up in the morning, but I love being up in the morning once I’ve managed to drag my sleepy ass out of bed.

There’s something so inviting to me about an early Saturday morning when my husband and son are still in bed, the dog’s still asleep and the cat is still lazing on top of my sleeping husband (they’re having a very intense love affair).

The house is quiet and chilly now that fall has arrived, and the day is full of so much promise.

Don’t get me wrong, I love to sleep and have had my challenges sleeping since my breast cancer experiences.  The Tamoxifen induced night sweats always seem to wake and then keep me up, the numbness in my hands from sleeping on my sides from the Taxol and the strange tugging and pulling of my implants all gang up on me to keep me tossing and turning all night.  But once I finally do fall asleep, that last stretch of deep and uninterrupted bliss between 4:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. is just heaven.

When the alarm goes off at 7:00 or 7:30, I hold on tightly to the blankets and keep my eyes firmly shut, hitting that snooze button at least 5 times before I finally get up and woozily stagger around with all my morning to do’s.

There’s a long list of chores before I can even get downstairs to eat breakfast starting with cleaning the cat litter (her box is in our bathroom so the dog can’t get to it; yeah, he eats cat litter, I know, gross), groggily washing up, throwing on some under eye concealer and putting on my eyebrows (they never really ever came back after the chemo so I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to recreate them every day, a weird thing I’m obsessed with mostly because having no eyebrows made me look sicker than losing my  hair so I’m crazy about adding them back to my face every day in the fear that I’ll scare my kids without them…..but I digress), throwing on some jeans, doing a quick sweep of the kids room and bathroom to gather all the clothes that are now on the floor so that I can get them downstairs to the laundry to be washed……and then after all these little morning tasks, I’m ready to stumble down the stairs for my breakfast ritual.

Breakfast is my happiest meal of the day.  I love the promise of a new morning.  I love the simplicity of steel cut oatmeal and fruit, and a really big cup of hot Barry’s Irish tea with milk in it.

My Scottish grandmother taught me at a young age how to make tea the Scottish way with milk and sugar and I’m very weirdly strict about the % ratio of milk to tea, it’s a very rigid formula I have and if someone asks to get me tea when we’re out they always get pretty intimidated by my request for an exact amount of tea to milk ratio. Have I mentioned how obsessive compulsive I am?

I love to sit quietly drinking my tea in the morning with no one around while I watch the birds, chipmunks, squirrels and rabbits running around the backyard.  It’s a veritable zoo up in my backyard in the mornings.

I also like to write, first thing in the morning.  If I don’t have client calls right away, it’s a stolen treat when I have 45 minutes to an hour to devote to a new post.  My mind runs a little more stream of conscious at this time of the day and the words flow out.  Not so sure that I’m saying anything very interesting or pithy, but words do pour out of me early in the morning.

I’m also a big list person.  I have a theory that it’s important to accomplish at least one small but meaningful task each day and after I’ve done that, I can spend the rest of the day, if it’s the weekend, lazing around reading or catching up on Orange Is the New Black Season 2.  Today’s list has about 7 things on it but one of them (cleaning the basement) could easily take 2 days, so might wind up flowing over into Sunday as well.

What about you guys?  What’s on the agenda for your upcoming weekend?