Sleeping In

I woke up a little while ago and looked at the clock, and I was shocked (and a bit appalled) to see that it was already 8:53.  Can you believe I slept in 'til almost 9:00?  I feel like a real lazybones.  A slacker.

Usually, my internal body clock wakes me up by 7:00 or before; and usually, I set my alarm as a back-up.  But last night I was too tired to remember to tell Siri (my little personal assistant) to give me an early wake-up call, which is too bad because I have lots of items on my "to do" list for today and I didn't want to sleep the morning away.

Oh well, these weary bones of mine must have needed the extra rest.

Maybe my body is screaming for extra sleep to make up for all those years that my boys--who were always the earliest of birds--were up and at 'em by 5:30.  Reveille was at oh-dark-thirty at the Pearl house; you could set your watch by it.  We could have kept those rascals up 'til midnight and they still would have been raring to go by 5:30.  When our third son was born, our oldest son was 2 and 1/2 and our second was 15 months.  Believe me, there wasn't a whole lot of sleeping in going on.

Okay, tell me this photo didn't just make you smile!  Son #2 cracks me up here.  Today, he's a grown-up high school math teacher/football and lacrosse coach.  And he always wears pants when he knows he's getting his picture taken.  Son #1 is showing an early talent for holding babies, which is coming in handy these days in his role as father to twin girls with another baby on the way.  And he, too, is never photographed pants-less.  Son #3, the tiny newborn who's at the mercy of his two older brothers here, now towers over them both.  And he would no longer be caught dead in a nightgown.

When I look at old photos of my three oldest boys, who were born so close together that I was basically wearing maternity clothes for four years straight, I sometimes wonder how I did it...then I think of my sister-in-law who has triplets and my daughter-in-law who has twins, and I realize that relatively speaking, my life was a cakewalk.  And I loved those days.  I miss those days!

I mean, look at the two big brothers showering their baby brother with love in this snapshot.  How sweet...Yikes--they look like they're going to squish him.  Why am I just sitting there?  (Am I asleep?)

You may have noticed that my boys were really not all that into wearing pants.  (But we lived in Florida back then, and it was always so HOT!  That's our excuse, and we're sticking to it!)

When the little guy in these pictures was a year old, we found out that another little boy was on the way.  So there were many, many years of early wake-ups, believe me.  And then #5 joined the family fraternity five years after #4.  It wasn't until they were all teenagers that my five boys began to appreciate sleep.

Okay, I better end here because I feel like I'm beginning to ramble.  I woke up late, so that made me decide I would blog about sleeping in...which made me think back on those days when I never could have slept in, even if I'd wanted to...which made me miss having little boys in the house...which made me break out an old photo album and get all nostalgic...which made me put you through my little trip down memory lane.  This is what the blogging process is like for me.  Sorry about that.

And I hope you've gotten more accomplished before 9:00 a.m. today than I did!  (With four sons in the Army, I should be ashamed of myself!)