Waking Up is hard to do

I am not the best at waking up. I do it every morning, don’t get me wrong, but it is a struggle. It doesn’t really matter how early or late I go to bed, waking up is hard.

I’ve never been especially good at rising early. By early I mean before 7. I’ve tried every gimmick in the book; all to no avail. I’ve tried going to bed earlier. I’ve tried setting my alarm for an earlier time so I can play the snooze game before getting up. I’ve tried praying God would wake up when I needed to get up.

Not to say prayer didn’t work; maybe God thought I needed to sleep in, but none of the things I tried worked.

Which is why it was so strange to wake up at 5 this morning.  I laid in bed trying in vain to go back to sleep for about 45 minutes. Most people when they wake up in the wee hours will get out of bed and eat, not me. I get out of bed to visit the “necessary room” because I am usually convinced my bladder woke me up.

That didn’t work this morning. I returned to bed and hopefully to sleep. Nope. I laid there for another hour. (An HOUR!) Before I gave up and prayed, “Lord, You woke me up and I can’t go back to sleep, what do You want me to do?”

Imagine my shock when almost immediately I “heard” the following response:

Get up and make coffee.

I shook my head in questions, “Get up and make coffee? Really? Then what?”

Get up and make coffee.

Over and over for a few minutes. So I got up and made the coffee.  I poured myself a cup and sleepily found my way to my favorite chair with my nook in hand. I started reading on facebook, while I sipped my coffee, still utterly confused as to why I had to get up so early just to make coffee. I felt God say:

I didn’t say read facebook.

Whoops. I opened YouVersion and began reading today’s reading in the plan I’m following.

And I felt God smile.

He had verses jump off the page at me like never before.  I sipped my coffee while my eyes followed the words on the page.

My spirit was restored.

 

Gotta Get UP!

Mr. FullCup gets up every morning at a very obscene hour. Honestly. There are some numbers on the clock you should only see once a day.

Take 5 o’clock for example. One should only see one 5 o’clock a day. To see it more than that is just wrong.  Just remember 6 followed by an a.m. is bad, 5 followed by an a.m. is horrible.

Early this morning I heard him get up, walk around and come back to bed. The fact that I heard anything is unusual as I sleep like the dead.

Yeah. It’s both a blessing and a curse at times.

A few hours later I woke with a start realizing I hadn’t heard him get up again. I checked the clock at it was 5:49. OH NO!! He had overslept.

I flip over and start to frantically shake Mr. FullCup hollering in a whisper that he was late and needed to get up.  When shaking alone wasn’t working, I started using my feet to kick him awake too.

Imagine my horror as my feet never collided with him at all. That’s when I realized he wasn’t asleep, he was dead.

Someone had broken into our house last night and sawed his lower half off and left his upper body in bed. How they managed to get past the alarm system without the police coming was a mystery to me.

I was still shaking him and just getting into a really good cry when I realized I wasn’t shaking him at all.

Oh great! The perps had not only cut him in two, taken his lower half; they also made out with his upper body too.

And then I realized, as I heard him close the bathroom door, I was frantically shaking his pillow.

And that is the last time I read the end of Hebrews 11 before bed.

(Incidentally all of this is mostly true. I might have embellished a little bit…but not much.)

Make my coffee vat sized, please.

Today I could use some coffee. Let’s make it a small, medium, large, jumbo, pot, no, let’s make it a vat. Obviously I really really REALLY need coffee.

I don’t know something about still being awake at 12:20 and then have the trusty old alarm clock blare in your blissfully ignorant sleeping ear at 6:15. When you’re old.

I always thought old people needed more sleep. It seems to me the older I get the less sleep I get. By the time I’m 50 I’ll be sleeping like Elizabeth did as a baby.

Want to know how she slept? That’s easy. She didn’t. Not. At. All. And if she didn’t sleep guess who else didn’t sleep? Yup, that’d be me.  But in the past 8 years I’ve gotten accustomed to sleeping again and it’s grand really.

Except on days like today. Days like today..I’m not sure there is enough coffee in the world…and to prove my point exactly, I can’t remember the rest of that sentence.

People will never know if I have Alzheimers. “Did you know Mrs. FullCup has alzheimers?”
“Really? She does? She’s always been like that.”

Speaking of alzheimers, I was talking with a friend yesterday who out of the blue used the word “warped”. I honestly can’t remember the context of the conversation at all. I had to jump in and say “Warped. That’s my nickname.”

Because you know I’ve been called that a few times.

The response? “Warped?” I can see that.” Longish pause. “Kind of.” I wanted to say, “Hey it’s okay to say you can really see that and then have a good laugh because honestly I’ll tell the world about this conversation and we’ll all laugh.”

Today Catherin had to go to school faking an injury. Yeah, you try explaining that to an 11 year old Chinese student. I had no idea how to do this. So I called in a few favors and Catherin was ready for school.

When we pulled up to our friends office where he was going to help get her ready, we told Catherin what we were doing and she decided she’d really rather not. It seems she misunderstood what we said and thought we were bringing her there to be injured.

It didn’t help matters at all when our friend offered to cut her face and stitch it up for her.

I told her for the picture to look especially injured.

I thought I lost my mind.

I did. I really did.

This afternoon my family left me to my own devices, which could be a bad thing except it wasn’t. Not today anyway. Today I plopped my body on the couch and watched an old Desi Arnaz flick that was literally about 15 minutes long. Just long enough for him to sing two songs, one of which was of course, Babaloo. I love that song.

Next I started watching a Lucille Ball movie but thought I’d wait for the girls to come home so I switched to watching an episode of The Gilmore Girls.   And my eye lids started to get heavy. They got very heavy.  I closed my eyes just long enough to rest them a bit and then I was going to open them.

When I did open them I was surprised to find Gilmore Girls was almost over, I had missed most of the episode. I watched some of it when I thought I heard voices on the porch and thought my family had returned. Only they never came in. I looked out the windows and didn’t see the van.

But I kept hearing voices on the porch. I glanced from my couch vantage point out the windows and saw no one. When I kept hearing them, I got up and looked outside thinking the neighbor girl was out there talking to herself. No one was on my porch.

Still hearing voices as I check the thermostat in the house and move to turn on the air conditioners. I think it must be my other neighbor’s girlfriend outside talking but it really sounds like it is coming from my porch. But glances out the window reveal no one on my porch. Not a soul in sight anywhere.

I’m still hearing voices. I walk over and look out again on my porch and my girls are sitting there on the bench chatting up a storm. Or actually, Elizabeth was reading aloud all the funny parts of her book.

I opened the front door and asked why they hadn’t come in. “Because Daddy dropped us off and you were sleeping.”

“Did you think to ring the doorbell?”

“Yes and we rang it. Elizabeth wanted to ring it twice but I wouldn’t let her.”

“Did  you think about knocking?”

“Oh yes, we did that too.”

I heard nothing. Not a doorbell or a knock. Nothing.

But at least I’m not crazy.