Besides the whole lack of sleep thing, it works out pretty well. VikingDad gets the kids on the bus in the morning. I come home, get an hour nap, and get the kids off the bus. No childcare need be purchased.
And it's not as difficult to get up at 3:30AM as you'd think. I hate getting up at 4:30 or 5:30 because my body knows it's bullshit.
"Hey, what the fuck do you think you're doing? It's not morning yet- go back to sleep!" So says my body.
But, at 3:30, my body doesn't even recognize that it's morning yet.
"Hey, we're getting up in the middle of the night! We must be getting ready to sneak behind enemy lines and save the world, or why else would we be up this early??? I'd better shoot adrenaline all over the place."
So, my eyes pop wide open is if the whole Third Reich were coming for me the second my alarm goes off.
Then, after getting ready for work, I have to cross my half acre of yard to get to the driveway. Since I live on a farm in the middle of nowhere, during the daytime the farm smells vaguely goaty, somewhat like fresh cut hay (in the summer), and most definitely pastoral. At 3:30 AM however, it smells like wild things. If my brain didn't wake me up with shocks of adrenaline, I would wake up the second I stepped out the door. The primal part of the human brain knows that darkness, proximity to wilderness, and the slightly musky smell of wild animals that have recently passed through are signs that things are not quite safe and it's time to be alert.
True to every hick stereotype, we have big dogs that sleep on our porch in nice weather, so the first thing I do is check them. If they are awake, it's not likely that a bear is going to crash out of nowhere and maul me. On the other hand, if they are asleep, anything goes. If I can sneak up on my dogs, so can a super stealthy ninja bear bent on destruction.
But, so far at least one of them is aware of my presence before I check on them. (Not today, ninja bears!) From there I can cautiously enjoy the night/morning/whatever it is. This morning, the sky was clear (actually pretty rare) so I could see the entire night (morning?) sky. It was magnificent, and the cool, fresh air of late summer invigorated me. That was all well and good, but, when I get up so early, I have to beware the morning crash that inevitably follows when my brain finally realizes that there are no Nazis around to fight, and, in fact, we've been awake this whole time without doing anything remotely life-threatening.
This usually happens around 7. My brain obviously is capable of tricking itself into thinking there are Nazis for 3.5 hours but no more. So, come 7, a powerful fog of sleepiness will envelop me.
I will be forced to walk around the guard shack pretending every rustle in the grass is a mini-Nazi sneaking up on me in order to get my brain to care about being awake. It doesn't usually work because, although it's easy to convince my brain that Nazis and ninja bears are real threats in the dead of night (early morning? Whatever), in broad daylight my brain is not so easily fooled. Years of evolution have taught our species that Bad Things happen when it's night, but in the day we're kings of the castle and obviously nothing is going to invade our sense of complacency (except mosquitoes, who are a constant threat no matter when you go out.) In fact, it's usually the constant biting of mosquitoes that keep me awake the rest of the day.
(Mosquitoes totally count as Nazis.)
Today, though, someone accidentally blasted their car horn when I was right by his car handing him paperwork. That woke me up!
No comments:
Post a Comment