On Weekends

I am not a morning person. My mantra in life is "5 more minutes." I can sleep for 14 hours straight (hypothetically, that is), and still be grumpy when my alarm clock wakes up. Growing up was slightly awful in this regard because my parents are chipper morning people. Vacations with my parents were a nightmare. My father would wake me up at o'dark thirty to go get to the beach before anyone else could. This led to arguments. Every. Single. Morning. Non-vacations weren't much better. I wanted to sleep in as late as humanly possible, and my parents wanted me out of bed like 10 minutes ago. Cure more arguing here. For the record, I was never into Saturday morning cartoons. I liked them fine and all, except for that one slight problem of they came on in the morning.

I had a friend whose whole family were late risers. It was rare to make plans with her for a weekend before like 3:30pm. I thought she was the luckiest girl in the world. I swore up and down on my life that when I got older, I would grow up to be just like her. Truth is, she still hasn't changed. She will not get up before noon, 2:00 if she can't help it. I'm still envious. I still believe in 5 more minutes. And my father still likes to get up at 6:30am. When he does not need to be at work until 4:00pm. (My family puts the fun in dysfunction. For this and so many other reasons.)

Remember when weekends were about fun? About going to the park, and shopping, and to the movies with friends, and to the constant stream of birthday parties? (Ok, maybe they weren't that great for our parents. At least when she was at work, my mother didn't have to worry about an 8 year old asking for a pet penguin every 5 minutes.) I miss those days. Lately, it seems like weekends are more stressful than some weekdays. Today, I was talking with some friend about meeting up with her tomorrow to hand some paperwork over to her. I apologized that we'd be on base early and asked if it was ok with her if I met her before 1:30. She thought I was crazy and told me that they have kids. They're always up and dressed by 8:00am on Saturdays. I thought to myself "poor A" and chalked this up to just one more reason for why TLS and I will not have kids- so we can actually enjoy our weekends for fun.

Then I thought about our weekend plans:
*drop off paperwork with A
*do laundry
*mop kitchen floor
*drop off dry cleaning
*run/empty the dishwasher (times 3- German dishwashers are tiny!)
*check mail before the post office closes at 1:00
*buy birthday gift for a friend
*figure out what's for dinner
*buy ingredients for dinner
*cook dinner
*clean the kitchen after cooking dinner
*head to Ikea
*assemble insertnameofflatpackedobjecthere

 About that.

At least we can have wine while doing all that, especially assembling the random flat packed furniture that is bound to follow us home.

On second thought, add "buy wine" to my to-do list.