Three weeks into school and my children are starting to figure out this getting up in the morning is going to be an everyday thing. Here in beautiful, crime-free Iuka, Mississippi, we have just hit an annual milestone. It comes every August about this time. It’s that day of the year where school catches up to them and I get home from work to find a scene straight out of Jonestown. Bodies laying all over my house. Not moving. Like there’s been a tragic gas leak. It is the glorious day of the year where my children, so worn out from school, pass out around 3:30 p.m. and do not stir until about 6 a.m. the next morning.
If we were lucky, they went down without their faces submerged in their bowls of afterschool Cheetos. If not, the next morning it’s going to basically take a sandblaster to get the orange off their faces. Because, friends, you do not disturb the bodies of children on the one night of the year when the adults can watch whatever they want on TV. There’s a new Game of Thrones show on HBO Max! I can’t even watch that show with the sound off when the kids are awake. Just the closed captioning is dirtier than early Eddie Murphy comedy. And though it’s true the last season of Game of Thrones was more disappointing than later Eddie Murphy comedy, I’m still going to watch when I can. And if that means my oldest son is going to have to sleep on the floor of his bedroom with his Nikes on and his hand wrapped around a half-drunk twenty ounce Cherry Pepsi, so be it.
Let ye who do not binge streaming content cast the first stone.
Going to sleep in the daylight and waking up in the daylight is disorienting, to say the least.
This morning, when I asked the autistic five year-old, “Are you awake, buddy?” He didn’t move. He just replied, from under the covers, “No.”
I don’t think he was implying that no, he wasn’t awake and was talking in his sleep. I think he was saying, “No, don’t talk to me until I figure out how I fell asleep watching Thomas the Tank Engine and then I woke up with a full grown beard.”
I get it, little man. What you did last night wasn’t so much sleeping as it was hibernating in your school clothes. I’ve heard of comas lasting shorter times than my kids’ snooze. Who needs melatonin and Ambien when you’ve got kindergarten and fifth grade?
Of course, kindergarten is exhausting enough, especially for the neurodivergent. The knockout punch for the fifth grader was “Sorting Day”, where fifth graders are placed in various “houses” that will serve as social and mentoring circles for them throughout their middle school experience. These eight houses are made up of students from every grade and encourage social interaction and growth.
The day is kind of like a more inclusive college sorority pledge week mixed with field day. No matter which it’s more like, you have to take a thorough shower the next morning. My appreciation for Sorting Day grew by leaps and bounds when my ten year old slept fourteen straight hours so, when he woke up, for the first time in three weeks he didn’t tell me I was “ruining his life … on purpose!” when I woke him up at 6:30.
He woke up with a smile on his face and a spring in his step - at least until we were out of Cherry Pop Tarts which, according to him, was a “conspiracy against me!”
Well, at least they still look sweet sleeping.