Early Mornings

For as long as I can remember, I have loved to sleep in.  My mom would tell you that I actively resisted sleep as a child so I like to think that I've been making up for lost time ever since I hit adolescence.  Shawn, on the other hand, has long been an early to bed, early to rise kind of a guy.  In fact, our sleep schedules were so incompatible that I have been slowly working on training myself to go to bed earlier and earlier for our entire relationship.  All of my hard work flew out the window when we welcomed Nicole into the world and I then lived the next 16 months of my life with incredibly interrupted sleep.  I'm actually not sure how my body (or mind!) survived all of that disruption but I do know that once I sleep trained her I felt completely entitled to as many long and luxurious hours of sleep as I could afford.  It was completely normal for me to sleep until she woke up sometime around 7am, which usually meant that I was getting far more than 8 hours of sleep each night.  It was restorative and freeing for a time but after awhile I started to turn into a little bit of a sleep hog. 

Shawn started encouraging me to wake up on purpose to start my mornings alone. I hated the idea of setting an alarm clock so I resisted his gentle promptings for months.  Then, one day while I was thinking about our new baby, I was struck with the realization that going back to a highly disrupted sleep schedule was going to absolutely wreck me.  I knew that Shawn had been right all along and I needed to get my body used to waking up before 7am.  Thanks to a very active baby and a near-constant need to use the bathroom, it hasn't been a problem at all for me to wake up and start my day well before Nicole is up, even without an alarm clock.  Although I was apprehensive that I would miss my long and luxurious hours of sleep, I am surprised by how much I love the quiet solitude of the morning.

I still wouldn't call myself a morning person, but the hour that I spend alone each morning has been restorative and life-giving in its own right.  When I first started doing this my mind was full of the potential of an entire uninterrupted hour alone but after scanning through my to-do list, I made the decision that I wasn't to hit the ground running.  Instead, I wake up and spend the time either reading or writing, either cozied up in bed or perched at the kitchen table with a cup of hot tea in hand. 

I have no way of knowing what time(s) of the morning I'll be waking up with baby brother, especially initially, but assuming that he will be rising before his big sister Nicole, I already love the idea of having the quietness of the morning to ourselves. 

Do you have parts of your day that are restful and restorative? I'd love to hear about them!
Love,
Erica