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Weekend Mornings are the Best
Do you know what I like best about the weekend? The peace and calm I get to have each morning. I think I mentioned one time that I’m not a morning person. If I have to get up before 8:30am (or even 9:00am) I am not happy. So guess what that means? Monday through Friday I’m not happy.
But, on the weekend, the most glorious weekend, I get to sleep in. I usually do try to make it up by 9:30 am. This is of course if we have not planned an outing for the day, in that case I have to wake early and this results in another day of unhappy unless of course it’s a road trip. Then I manage to get over the early start in about .05 seconds.
From the time I was a little girl, staying up late and sleeping in was in my blood. My mom always said that she had a devil of a time trying to get my behind out of bed each morning. I remember her coming into my room 5 or 6 times to get me to get up! Ahh! I just hated it. Then as I moved into Jr. High School (which is what we called it back in the day) I was given an alarm clock. Do you know what I did? I would inevitably hit that snooze button 5 or 6 times!
I was the kid that couldn’t wait for college classes and be done with high school. Not because I didn’t like high school, au contraire, I am the weird kid you hated in school because I loved (and still do) school. The reason why I was ready for college was to shed that early morning schedule of high school and make my own, dang, late as possible, class schedule. You know what?? That is just what I did. I picked all my classes as late as I could possibly get them and I was in heaven through my college years. Finally, I had a schedule that would conform to my own natural instincts.
Lucky for me, Dude ended up being just like me. He loves to stay up late and sleep in. Well, that was one thing we weren’t going to argue about!
Then along came the kids. I vowed to teach those rugrats a lesson or two about how the schedule worked in our house. I was gonna make the kids “stay up late and sleep in late people” if it killed me. The first couple of months were rough, no lie. Why is it that little babies are early risers? Why can’t late rising be genetic? Boy did I have my work cut out for me! Everyone of my little darlings wanted to go to bed at 8:00pm and be up at 6:00am. Well, I was having none of that, mind you.
Thank goodness for soda and all things sugary. I just threw some of that sugary good stuff in their bottles each evening and fed them a great deal of sugary snacks before bed and that had them buzzing around the house for hours on a high with a big crash at the end and then off to bed around 11:00pm or so. Then they miraculously didn’t get up until 8:30am or 9:00am. Ahh! Success at last.
I hope you guys aren’t buying this. I wouldn’t put soda in a baby’s bottle. Please….I didn’t even bottle feed them, they were nursed and besides they liked the soda better right out of the can, anyway, so that’s how they got it. Soda in one hand, gummy worms in the other while racing around the house for hours in their baby walker 🙂
Well at some point in their early life success was at hand and all my kids, one way or the other, conformed to staying up late and sleeping in. This of course, did pose the same problem my mom had with me once they were school aged, but it was nothing that a few days of going to school in their pj’s didn’t fix and they soon learned that we can sleep in on the weekends but just learn to hate life during the week.
Now that it’s back to pretty much Dude and me (Tinki is homeschooled so we can make our own late school schedule) I have relished my weekends. Even though I wake up on Saturday and Sunday around 9ish, both of my guys tend to sleep in later than that which leaves me an hour or sometimes two of shear quiet and serenity.
I wake up, open my windows to my lovely garden and village, put on a pot of coffee and make breakfast, then I sit and read or surf the net (reading my favorite blogs). Occasionally I will turn on the TV, but not too often since it messes with the silence.
On the weekend there is no noise since the house is still sleeping and our town is so quiet. No hustle bustle feeling of trying to get ready for work or the day. I only hear the coffee maker, the wind in the trees, the birds singing and the tapping of the keyboard.
Since being married and having children I have had for the past 20+ years, someone always there next to me at any given time of day. There were little ones tugging at my feet and following me everywhere I go. They were my little buddies and I was never alone. It was exactly how I wanted it to be, too. I had a lot of children because I am an only child and I hated it. I still do. I wanted my kids to always have someone to play with or someone to fight with and many choices to do either of those with. As they got older the house was always full with them and their friends. Then there were all the extra-curricular activities which seemed to be so dang early on Saturday morning!
Now, with the oldest three gone and moving to a new place, quiet has come to our house once more. My few precious hours each morning on Saturday and Sunday are exactly what I need to refresh myself. It really is nice to not have to converse with any one, to know you have a few hours to yourself and your own thoughts and to be able to just breathe and be calm. Nothing is a rush and everything can wait. That is how I feel for those few precious hours each weekend morning. I can leisurely sip my coffee without knowing I have to run out the door soon. I even indulge myself in a second cup and leisurely sip that one, too.
The house could be falling down around me (and it pretty much is right now) but I don’t have to think about it or worry about it for a small bit of time. My weekend mornings are what stress relief is made of and is something I eagerly look forward to at the end of each week. Ohh, the sweetness of a quiet country life on a weekend morning, even if it is for only a few hours. Then it’s back to the madness at hand called “Life at the Fisher House”….Well, I guess I had better enjoy the serenity when I can since I think I might be hearing my house fall down soon.
Good Advice Not Taken-Big Mistake
I love the weekend. Doesn’t everyone? I love to sleep in and enjoy the morning in my PJ’s. Well this morning was no exception. I woke up around 10 AM. Yes-you read right. 10:00 AM. I’m proud to say it, too.
Since we are still all in the living room, I get to wake up to the most wonderful view of our garden trees. I love it. I feel like I’m at some resort on vacation. So on the weekend, I have a tendency to wake up and then just lie in bed for half an hour looking out the windows. It’s so serene and calm.
Around 10:30 I decided that I had better get up and start my day. Normally on Saturdays I start the coffee, make some breakfast and watch something interesting on TV like “Tous Ensemble” or “Maison A Vendre”. If nothing terrific is showing then it’s the old, mindless stand-by “Luxe TV”.
Well today started out normal, I woke up late, stayed in bed for the usual half an hour then got up to make coffee. That was where the normal part ended. After I started the coffee I went over to the TV and turned it on. Dude and I had watched a movie the night before so when I turned on the TV it was still on the same movie channel. This morning there was a movie about to start and some guy was introducing it, but the sound was all the way down because Dude and Tinki were still asleep. I figured I would see what the movie was all about before changing channels. While this guy was doing his intro, I walked back into the kitchen to get all my stuff ready for making breakfast.
When I walked back into the living room I was greeted by the most outrageous piece of porn that should never be on at 10:30am on a Saturday morning! It was also in the first 3 minutes of the film! Please!!! What was the world coming to??! Good thing the sound was turned down or it probably would have woken up my gang. The worst part was that I couldn’t change the channel (not cuz I didn’t want to, but because I really couldn’t)! See lately we’ve been having a problem with our cable box. We’re in the process of rewiring the house and have only gotten some of the lines done, but we still need to redo the outside lines (not sure if this is the problem, but it seems to have begun at this point). Well, for the past few weeks our cable box just gets stuck. You can’t turn the channel and you can’t fix the sound.
Fortunately at this moment the sound was down, like I mentioned, but unfortunately my cable box and remote had to pick a terrible time not to cooperate with each other. So there I was, right in front of my giant TV screen (at eye level I might add), with XXX rated stuff happening at Saturday morning cartoon time and frantically trying to change channels. I finally decided to take the batteries out of the remote and put them back in thinking that would help. I looked at the TV screen, nope still XXX going on. By this I was beginning to go into shock cuz it was getting worse on screen and a little hot in the room. Is there such thing as XXXX movies??!!
At this point, I decided just to pull the plug on the cable box. Unlucky for me there are 3 of them to choose from. I pulled the one I thought would work and all I got was “your signal has been lost” with the picture of full on boobies right in front of me as a screen shot window saver! Dang it! I kept thinking Dude was gonna wake up and say, “Is this what you watch in your spare time?” Geesh.
Finally I found the right plug, pulled it and the screen went dark. I was making so much noise by now that Dude woke up and asked me what I was doing. Since I am a good and honest girl, I told him the truth. He was like, really, at this time of day?? He told me to take the batteries out of the remote. I told him I tried that already and it didn’t work. Just for extra good measure I decided I would try it again before turning the cable back on. No sense in giving myself a heart attack when flipping the switch.
I plugged the cable box back in and that dang movie came on again (luckily the “hot stuff” was over by then), but this time I was able to change the channel to something more Saturday morning appropriate. I found a nice show on houses in France.
After this little episode, I suddenly remembered some advice that a friend of mine living in France had given me. She said that if you watch a movie at night, make sure that when you go to bed to turn the channel to something more family friendly. She told me that one night her and her husband were watching a movie and they both happened to fall asleep with the TV on. Sometime in the middle of the night she woke up and was in such shock at what she saw on the TV that she screamed out, threw her remote across the room and ran over as quick as she could (she said Olympic style) to turn off the TV. She said it took her 3 months to get over what she saw and personally, I think she might still have psychological damage from it.
Well, guess what? I didn’t heed her good advice. I should have and I will from now on just to avoid any trouble for myself in the future. Dang French TV.
I think that after my difficult morning and working the rest of the day on the house, I’m going to enjoy a nice dinner, a glass of wine and a more down to earth movie. “Somewhere in Time” here I come.
Welcome to my crazy life in the south of France. I love to write and photograph the day to day experiences that I encounter here in Provence. I hope this blog will give readers an inside look at some of the insane, funny, and beautiful experiences that I have had along the way in making a life for myself in France. 
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