Waking up early

One of my kids is an early riser. And that means we are all early risers now.

Young Tancred (3) never knowingly misses welcoming in the child of morning, rosy-fingered dawn, with a hearty slam of his bedroom door.

And that’s just a metaphor, because at this time of year “dawn” in the sense of “sunrise” comes approximately half an hour after I leave the house to go to work.

People of England: one compelling reason to hope for, pray for  – hell, even campaign for – Scottish independence is that the only people who actually want the clocks to go back in October would no longer be our fellow citizens.

The 200 or so sheep farmers (and ten to fifteen remaining milkmen) for whose benefit the remaining 60 million of us spend the best part of six months only seeing natural daylight at weekends would be someone else’s problem.

Anyway, back to our youngest.

Usually and non-metaphorically, he’s welcoming that obscure 5.30am to 5.45am slot, during which he:

1. Wakes up;
2. Has a big shit and then;
3. Decides it’s time everyone else – principally (although not exclusively) his elder brother, Roger Jr – was awake too.

Even if I sleep through or pretend to sleep through the initial barrage, I can rest assured that I will soon be woken by one grassing the other up for something or other, or someone needing their arse wiping. My favourite way to start the day. 

Roger Jr and Tancred are very different characters. While Roger Jr is eager to please and (as a corollary) fairly obedient, Tancred is a thoroughgoing anti-authoritarian anarchist. He obeys no law but himself. Nietzsche would be proud of him. Nietzsche, frankly, is welcome to him.

Every night, we pack him off to bed with a reminder that he’s to stay in his room until his clock tells him it’s morning, that he’s not to wake Roger Jr up, that he’s to stay quiet etc. And he goes along with it.

But come the morning, he does whatever he damn well feels like. Which 9 times out of 10 is to disregard the instructions he was given the evening before and go to play “jumping off the bed” or “hammering the floor with a shoe” or whatever else it is he and his brother get up to most mornings.

To be quite honest, this is starting to wear a little thin. Reasoning with a three-year old is difficult at the best of times. Reasoning with a three-year old sociopath is something else.

Your suggestions, dear readers, would be welcome.

Right now, all I can think of is to wait until he’s a teenager. And then wake HIM up EVERY MORNING.

FOR EVER.