It’s 5:25 a.m. I’m already midway through a hot cocoa with a strong belt of espresso poured in. The dogs are antsy and confused, but mostly hopeful that breakfast will be served early today.
Rain drizzles outside, and it’s cold. If I had my way, I’d still be buried in bed beneath my weighted blanket.
But, duty calls.
It always does when you’re a parent.
I’ve already used part of my hour and a half of bonus wakefulness to shake alert my 15-year-old son who slept through his alarm (I heard it along with every click of the dogs’ nails as they roamed the hallways between midnight and 4 a.m. and some fairly spectacular snoring from the other side of the bed) and drive with him to basketball practice. Yup. Basketball. At 5 a.m.
It’s part of a special** training session with a coach who works with college and NBA athletes. He was super excited about it. Me? Not so much because I knew I’d likely be the one ferrying him between 5 and 7:30 a.m. and again at 7 and 10 p.m.
We’re just going to completely skip over how I was already freaked out about him playing basketball again in these COVID times. But, we’d already held him out for seven months, the longest he’d gone without playing a sport since he was 3 years old. He’s got big hoop dreams — playing in college and beyond — and every other skilled high school player continued playing throughout this pandemic. So, parent peer pressure won. Every time he heads to the gym, I hold my breath, hope for the best and then take him to get regularly tested for corona virus and non-step pester him about washing his hands (which, truth be told, I did before all this).
I know I’ll be drooping around 10 a.m., but for now, I’m making the most of my personal daylight savings time by purging my phone of old grocery lists, deleting emails, mopping, putting away last night’s dishes and checking my calendar for the week ahead. Oh, and writing a blog post that I figured I had absolutely no time for this week.
Yay me! I think I’ve earned a nap, which I’ll probably get to redeem sometime in 2023. After No. 3 is in college.
*Note there’s no “good” in front of that.
**Special in this case means inconvenient AND expensive.
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