The Butt Crack of Dawn

I love sleep. It’s one of my favorite hobbies. Sleeping is free and contributes to good health. But unlike some of my actual hobbies like cycling or gaming, my wife can attest that if I don’t get enough sleep, I get cranky. How I wake up can really set the tone for the rest of day, even if I drink copious amounts of caffeine at the beginning of the day. I try to get up at the same time every day, but thanks to the unfortunate axis of the planet Earth, the summer sun rises in Minnesota at approximately the most inopportune time of the day, crushing my soul and beginning my slow march towards sleep deprivation and waking my children and cat up at the aforementioned Butt Crack of Dawn.

What exactly is the Butt Crack of Dawn? I’m sure you’ve experienced it at some point in your life. It’s the rather inconvenient time of the morning where you are awoken to any sound, light, movement, or an array of things that happen to be timed within 15 minutes of your alarm going off. It can start with pretty much anything.

These days, I start work at 7:00am. Thankfully, my office is only an 8-minute drive or a 19-minute bike ride away. With my alarm set for 5:30am the next morning, I lay down to sleep the night before for a planned 8 hours of quiet, uninterrupted sleep. I think about my breakfast, the outfit I’ve picked out for work, and whether I will be motivated enough to ride my bike instead of driving to the office.

Normally, I like mornings. It’s really nice when the world is still fairly quiet. I like that there’s less traffic to collide with me while riding my bike to work. I like that it’s not yet 90° with 400% humidity. The sound of birds chirping brings me delight. There are tons of benefits to waking up early. But all that is thrown out the proverbial window when either our cat or one of kids is awakened by the flaming ball of nuclear fission we call the Sun as it shines onto their faces. Suddenly, I awake to the movement of a child climbing on top of me at the wonderfully predictable time of 5:20am. Or the sound of my cat coughing up a hairball or some other disagreeable object unto the floor at 5:20am.

This is not only the worst time of the morning to wake up, it is impossible to go back to sleep. I cannot wake up right before my alarm gone off, fall back to sleep for 10 minutes, and wake up refreshed. There must be a biological reason for this. I should add up all the minutes of lost sleep over the years. Surely I owe my body somewhere around 300 hours worth of shut-eye in order to pay off my sleep debt by now. Perhaps the only thing I’ll be able to do when I retire is take daily naps. This is, of course, only from my perspective. My wife probably owes herself 300 years worth of sleep because she actually wakes up in the night when she hears a cat meowing or a child crying in the night, where I just lay there in a snoring lump.

Will things get better as I get older? Maybe when I retire and my wife and I have the house to ourselves again will we be able to sleep again. Hopefully, we’ll even be able to go to bed when we want and take naps again. As long as we don’t get another cat.

How about you? Are you a morning person who doesn’t mind an early sunrise?