Good Morning, Sunshine!… Now Get Your Ass Back To Bed

My son gets a lot of things from me: his charming personality, his dashing good looks and his razor sharp intellect. Sure, he’s not yet four, but he can count up to 30 without leaving out more than one or two numbers and he has developed some stunning Candy Land strategies.

You Bastard!

Among the many other traits he’s inherited from me is the complete and total inability to stay asleep once the sun has risen.

This trait has served me well as an adult, almost serving a sort of internal alarm clock which jolts me out of bed on those days when I forget to set my real alarm clock or during times when I want to watch that hot chick who jogs past my house in that tight sports bra most mornings. I’ve usually accomplished a dozen things and had way too much coffee to drink each day before more people have even stumbled out of the shower.

But what first appears to be a superpower for adults could arguably be seen as as evil power when it is possessed by children, especially for the parents that have to live with kids that get up at the crack of dawn every day.

Understand where I’m coming from?

For the past three months my wife and I have been thrown off schedule by a three and a half year old kid who almost instantly jumps (literally) out of bed when the sun rises, clumps across his bedroom floor and then marches into our bedroom, demanding to know why we aren’t awake yet, too.

“Because it’s early…” is the only answer we can usually mumble.

“No it isn’t. It’s MORNINGTIME!” is the subtle answer he yells each day as he climbs up onto our bed to drive home his point by poking us, prodding us, hitting us with pillows, jumping on us or just sitting on our faces and humming a little tune. And though copious amounts of coffee during the day have taken the edge off the evening bedtime ritual, we regularly find ourselves peeking out the windows and trying decide if it’s “dark enough” for him to really feel as though it’s late enough to go to bed.

We’ve tried just about everything.

We’ve told him he can stay in his room and read his books quietly, but that only entertained him for a day. We tried three different “light blocking” blinds and even created our own clever solutions, but there are only so many times you can tape aluminum foil and trash bags up on the windows before it convinces the neighbors that you’re growing pot. We tried teaching him to “look for the 7 at the front of the digital clock” readout in his room, but he regularly found the 7 in the “5:47″ readout and exclaimed that it was my wife and I who couldn’t tell time. We tried explaining to him that daddy has a good memory and a penchant for vengeance and he would remember all these early risings and pay them back in double when he was in high school. No dice.

The only reprieve my wife and I have gotten from this daily ritual is when an especially dark and rainy morning delays any indication of the sun being in the sky or even existing. On those precious few days my wife and I have actually been able to sleep in until the near-afternoon hour of 6AM or, in some rare cases, actually wake up on our own.

But with the summer solstice now past the amount of sunlight we’re cursed with each day will slowly wane, so that the tide of sunlight can turn back in the direction from whence it came and go scurrying off to its burrow a little later every morning.

I know that didn’t make any sense. Give me a break. I was woken up at 5:30…