Writing Before 6:00 am

Amid busy days, I have found time for writing.

For the past week or so, I’ve been waking up between 5:00 and 5:30 and decided to just roll with it.

I have always been a morning person. In college as an English major, I scheduled all of my classes before noon, usually starting with the earliest offering of a 7:45 am class. To make it even more interesting, my best writing was done under pressure, so I would wake up at 5:00 am on the morning that a paper was due and bang out the entire thing. Didn’t matter if it was 4 pages or 10 — I needed that “must get it done NOW” mentality to get my juices flowing.

Our household “wakeup time” is 6:45 am. My school-aged children share a room and know that they are not allowed to come out before that time. My husband is a night owl and he will keep sleeping until the alarm goes off (and then some). I also have a 9-month old baby so for a long time it has been waking and feeding her during the night, causing me to guard what precious sleep I could.

But in the past month or so, it has shifted. Baby sleeps through the night, though her natural rhythm seems to be to wake early. For awhile, it was 4:00 am. Broke her of that habit, and now she seems to wake around 5:30. She doesn’t even wake with a bang: I will hear her cooing through the monitor or playing with a toy…