Last night, Maia had a friend stay overnight. I planned to bake cinnamon rolls for breakfast and mixed up and panned a batch. It takes them some time to come to room temperature before baking in the morning and I thought how nice it would be if the refrigerator had some sort of mechanical arm to place items on my counter at certain times. You see, I didn't want the girls to wake up and then have to wait for the cold dough to warm up and then have to wait again while they backed but there was no helping it. I would set my alarm to wake up at 7 and we'd have hot cinnamon rolls by 8:30.
The girls went to bed late--but not alarmingly late--but I did not go to bed and actually fall asleep until a couple hours later. Don't you love when that happens? I kept looking at the clock and thinking 'Okay, it's 12:30 that means you have 6 and a half hours to sleep. Now it's 1:30....' I'm pretty sure I fell asleep by two; the last time I looked at the time it was 1:47.
I woke up at 6 am with no alarm one hour before I intended to wake up with the aid of the alarm shuffled out of bed, went down the stairs and staggered to the refrigerator. I opened the door with my eyes closed to avoid the garish light, grasped the cool metal of the pie pan the cinnamon rolls were nestled in and removed the pan from the fridge. Somehow the the refrigerator closed, perhaps by the reflexive foot kick I so often employ in my kitchen or perhaps it swung mercifully closed of its own accord. I only know the reddish color behind my eyelids faded to black as the door closed. I put the rolls on the counter near the stove and preheated the oven.
I guess I was the mechanical arm.
After all of this, I didn't bother going back to bed. I was meaning to get up in an hour anyways and I always find that if you wake up naturally* before your alarm that going back to bed to try to squeeze one more hour of sleep in never results in anything good. I find that I wake up cranky and not very easily that second time around.
Would you know Maia and her friend slept in until 9:30!? Tristyn slept until 8:40. My children--sleeping past 8:30 am is unheard of. They never do that. Those damn rolls which were piping hot at 7:30 am (the usual wake up time 'round these parts) were stone cold again by 8:30.
Ah well, the quietness of early morning was nice. I caught up on a few blogs (but didn't trust my coherency on that level of sleep to leave comments!) and knitted a few rows.
Now tonight, I could be sleeping and catching up. But instead at 10:20 pm I suddenly became possessed with the intense need to refill my cookie jar right now. And so I filled it with Iced-Oatmeal-No-Raisins-Thank-You-Very-Much Cookies. And I still didn't go to sleep because here I am. But I'm going, I'm going!
Goodnight all.
*Waking up unaided in the service of the bread is natural. Ahhh-hem! Let me amend that. It is to me.
