Wakey wakey

As we all know, there are only two types of people. No, not cat people and dog people. I mean morning people and night people. I’m a morning person and my wife is a night person. That’s all well and good – couples should complement each other – but the equation gets a little more complex when a child comes along. Who will they take after?

In the first year or two it was hard to tell, but as our son settled down into a routine, it became clear he'd inherited my wife’s genes for sleep patterns. On the weekends it’s great as we can sleep in. And we have enough friends with morning children (read waking up before 6am on Sundays) to count our blessings. But during the week when we have to get Santi to child care and then get to work, it’s a different story.

Since I'm the morning person, it’s left to me to get the family motor running. My wife is very good about it, and we now have an arrangement where I wake her up at least ten minutes before she actually has to get out of bed. And even if she's still half asleep, she always manages a rendition of her morning song for Santi:

Estas son las mañanitas, que cantaba el rey David
con sus hijos tan bonitos que pasaban por aquí

It's a little ditty with some birds that tweet, kings that parade and a sun that rises. Except our “son” doesn't rise. Not yet. This is just a primer for the challenge of actually getting him vertical. Some days he’s bright-eyed and happy to go along with the morning routine. Others, he really needs an incentive.

This usually comes in the form of something “very exciting” going on outside. This morning a racket started up outside our building at 7am – the people in the apartment next to us are ripping out their kitchen and the workmen were tossing the debris into a skip. I could hear other people in the upstairs apartments yelling out for the workmen to shut up, but I couldn’t have been happier with the disturbance. “What’s going on?” I said to Santi, watching his eyes flash open – no sleepy blinking today. “Do you think they might have come to cut the tree down?” I asked, alluding to one of his favourite books. “What do you think the birds are going to do?” I asked him. “They’re going to throw nuts and seeds on them?” he said, hopefully, expectantly. “Why don’t you go onto the balcony and have a look?” And voila, we have lift-off.

At other times it’s been one of his weekly postcards from his uncle and aunt in Tassie that arrived the day before and that we saved for the morning. Occasionally we have a new toy or book to lure him out of bed with. And one morning I was particularly fortunate to find that a green grocer cicada had flown through an open window during the night and was sitting on the kitchen benchtop. That was pretty special, and he still remembers it, a year or so later. I thought it might have even been enough to turn him into a morning person.

But no, it wasn’t. And unfortunately, you can’t always rely on cicadas. As we go through more and more mornings I’m finding my bag of tricks is starting to run perilously low. More to the point, it won’t be long until he wises up to my little “excitement” game and it gets even harder to coax him out of bed. Any suggestions, I'm all ears.