A bit of Uncle

My brother is a text book example of a workaholic. He rises early. Heads into work and puts in a 14+ hour day. Makes the 1+ hour drive back to the house where he takes his time putting around before crashing into bed.

This, however, isn't quite the reason he has trouble waking up in the morning. Certainly the lack of quality and quantity sleep compounds the problem, but my brother simply isn't a good morning person. To get up in the morning for work he sets a series of alarms. The first goes off sometime around 3:45am to jar him from a deep sleep. Another at 4. Another a 4:30 and then the "Holy crap I'm going late!" alarm goes off at 5.

When I was off on my "girl" trip with Mom this weekend we stopped in the "EVERYTHING" Thomas the Tank Engine store - only they don't quite call it that. We found a second "EVERYTHING" Thomas store. We bought a lot of Thomas. One of the items, the one I gave Logan when I got home and didn't tuck away for Christmas, was a good old fashioned two bells with a hammer alarm clock. He's learning to tell time but to date he's been reliant on the digitial clocks around our house. I want him to learn to use a standard clock too. We removed the clock radio from his room and put in the new one.

I thought that perhaps we'd avert our recent battles about putting clothes on by setting an audible signal. He can't fight that it is not yet time to dress if the loud obnoxious bell is going off saying it is. I set his alarm for what I thought was 7:30 - the Thomas clock only has one arm for the alarm set. You need to guesstimate anything that's not on the hour.

Logan is typically up by 7am regardless of what we do. Once in a blue moon he sleeps later. I figured 7:30 would get us to a point where he was already awake but enough time before 8am -- our real drop-dead time to start him in motion to get to school on time.

The very loud bells started clanging at 7:10. LOUD bells that don't stop until you turn them off. I ran down the hall. Logan had been asleep still. I thought perhaps the first time he had a real alarm wake him up he might be a bit scared. I rushed to comfort him and explain. Meg ran along behind me singing along with the bell tone.

As I pushed open the bedroom door I said "It's ok, just the alarm. Must be time to start getting ready for school!"

And he answered back with some deep breathing and stuffy nosed soft snores.