”
The best part of waking up, is Folgers in your cup
…
”
– Folgers Coffee Commercial
“The best part of waking up, is Folgers in your cup …”
– Folgers Coffee Commercial
In my house, we don’t have a “best part of waking up.” It doesn’t exist. This is because all three of us have different wake up styles, and frankly, not one style compliments another.
Take Harry, for example. He’s a quick waker-upper. The alarm goes off, he presses the snooze button, snores for precisely nine more minutes, springs out of bed, jumps into the shower and voila! His day has begun. Heeven speaks coherently BEFORE he has coffee.
And then there’s me. I’m not a quick waker-upper. I’m a slow waker-upper. And I don’t really like early morning. It’s not my best time. I look awful, my breath stinks and I can’t see a thing without my contact lenses. And until my first cup of coffee, I absolutely cannot remember where I live, who I am and why there is a cheerful person in my shower. And until my second cup of coffee, I spend most of my morning trying to not rip Harry’s cheerful head off his shoulders and use it as a bowling ball.
As for Junior, well, let’s just say he’s more like me than his dad. I swear to you, that child could sleep through a cannon going off right next to his head, but the minute Harry tries to wake him up by gently touching him on the shoulder, he bolts out of bed and roars like an old bear awakened two months early from his yearly hibernation.
But that doesn’t deter Harry. No, every weekday morning, Mr. Cheerful (also known in our house as Mr. Soon-To-Be-A-Bowling-Ball-Head), assumes his rightful role in our house as Official Waker-Upper of the Sontag Family.
The first thing he does is allow the alarm to go off. Now, I don’t know about you, but slow waker-uppers like me prefer a peaceful start to our day. My preference would be harp music playing softly in the background, while a chorus gently sang a wake-up song and I took about an hour or so to finally release myself from sleep.
Unfortunately, I’ve never had that happen. You see, Mr. Cheerful prefers to set the iPod alarm to Jimi Hendrix at full volume. So there I am, blissfully in dreamland, snoring away and all of a sudden I have Jimi full blast in my good ear–you know, the one that hasn’t had all the hearing knocked out of it by years of baby screams and rock music. I swear to you, I sit straight up in bed, heart pounding, totally freaked out. And Harry just reaches an arm out and hits the snooze button. Waking up suddenly doesn’t faze him at all.
I, on the other hand, am a basket case. I can’t calm down enough to go back to dreamland for nine minutes until I am shocked awake again. But Mr. Soon-To-Be-A-Bowling-Ball-Head is snoring peacefully.
I’m telling you, this ticks me off more than anything else he has ever done in nearly 21 years of marriage.
Every morning I wake up, wanting to choke the snores right out of him. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m kind of thinking that’s not really a good way to start the day. Or to have 21 more good years.
And I’m positive – POSITIVE – that if my dream wake-up call actually happened, I would be a better person. I would kinder to small children and animals. I would donate time to charity. I would be patient and sweet and a shoo-in to replace Mother Teresa.
Instead, because Harry insists on waking me by giving me heart palpitations and scaring the bejeebers out of me, I am a grumpy woman, doomed to be grumpy every morning until at least 10am. And my poor little son is doomed to the same fate. What’s worse is that he’s only ten, so he can’t use coffee as a wake-up crutch. So you can imagine how awful his mornings are. Harry wakes him by saying such horrifying things as, “Junior, it’s time to wake up, sleepy-head” in a soft, but annoyingly cheerful voice.
I mean, come on. Who wouldn’t wake up grumpy when woken up to that?
And then both of us stomp into the kitchen – Junior for breakfast, me for coffee – and we begin our daily ritual of glaring at Mr. Cheerful and wondering if we could install a bowling alley in the living room.
After all, we can dream, can’t we?
