Alarming

School starts next week and we're getting ready. School supplies, school clothes, school shoes, meet the teacher, the whole nine yards. It's busy, but nothing painful, nothing out of the ordinary. What is painful is getting back to our regular school schedule. In the summer we still have a bed time and that just has to be adjusted a bit to get it back in line. It's not the bed time that's the problem, it's the wake up, and to be honest it's not really the kids that are having a problem with it, it's me.
For the first time in 10 years I got to sleep in this summer. My children have always been early risers. At the first hint to light they were up and around and wanting to come get me and have breakfast. They also had no sense of days of the week. Every day, every single day, was the same painfully early morning. They would have made fine farmers, all of them. This summer they've finally started to slack off on the very crack of dawn. A few of them even slept in until the sun was above the horizon a few times. It was pretty amazing. What was even more amazing was that I convinced them that it was ok to just get up and play quietly for a while and let daddy sleep for a bit. They never play too quietly so I woke up soon after they did, but they didn't know that. I could just lay in bed for an extra half hour or so and wake up slowly. Snuggling in, dozing off, awaking slowly and peacefully. It was everything I thought it could be.
Now it's school time. We have to get up at the right time and get breakfast early so that we can get ready to be where we need to be. I have to drop four kids off at three schools over the course of an hour and it's all got to run like clockwork. None of this getting up and sitting on the couch for 20 minutes, nope, we're up and moving. We're practicing anyway. Practicing setting alarms. Practicing pulling ourselves out of bed and heading right to the cereal and milk. Conditioning ourselves for the rigors of the school year, and it hurts so much. That alarm clock. It's incessant. It goes off at the same time every morning. And I need to hop to it so that I can assist with milk pouring and getting spoons and making sweet sweet coffee. I'm only one day into it and I can already tell that I haven't lost my innate loathing for alarm clocks and regular wake up times in general. Like I say, the kids seem to be fine. They're bright eyed and bushy tailed and ready to take on the day for the most part. It's me that going to suffer at this reentry to the real world of schedules.