SoCS — Night owls and Morning People

Badge by: Doobster @ Mindful Digressions

 

This post is part of Linda G Hill’s “Stream of Consciousness Saturday”  Click on the link to read all the SoCS wonderfulness!

Today (which will be done for me in 34 minutes so I better hurry!) Linda gave us “opposites” as a prompt. The fact that I am still awake at 11:26 makes me think of an opposite that I deal with every day. My mother and I have always been night owls. Always. Maybe it’s a learned behavior or maybe it’s genetic, but either way, I have always been able to do stuff in the middle of the night. When I was growing up, my dad went to bed at 9:30 or so, snored loudly, and then got up and started doing things at 5:00 or 5:30. I’m not sure what things exactly, probably just reading the paper, going through the bills, that sort of thing, I’m really not sure. I suppose I could ask him. Maybe I should. My mom would get up around 7 and take care of things like making coffee. Breakfast was never a big deal in our house. Usually there was toast or cereal. When I was pretty young, my mom had a batch of sourdough starter that she’d made using her dad’s recipe. (I never knew my Papaw, but he has a really cool history, part of which is having been a chuckwagon cook!) Anyway, on Sundays she’d have to feed the sourdough, and while she was at it, she made sourdough pancakes. She made shapes out of them sometimes, like Mickey mouse or a rabbit or a smiley face. They were delicious! I think that she had the starter just for making pancakes because I never remember her making bread from it.

Anyway, back to the “opposites.” So I inherited, in one way or another, my mother’s propensity for staying up late. She didn’t discourage me in this: she’d make late night snacks sometimes, or we’d stay up playing Scrabble or doing crosswords or some other kind of word games. So now, I do a lot of my writing at night, or I do my French homework, or I read. I can concentrate better for certain things when it’s quiet and everyone is in bed.

My husband prefers to go to bed early, although not as early as my dad always did. If the two of us have this opposite between us, then maybe we’re a little like my parents. Since they celebrated their 60th anniversary last summer, maybe that’s not as bad a thing as we might think sometimes!

But…(shhhh, don’t tell my husband this part) my mother always told me that she thought true morning people were probably from a “bent branch” of the genetic tree…not that it made her love my dad any less for it! 🙂