Beech Tree News Network

If you are having difficulty getting out of bed in the mornings, might I suggest the services of my granddaughter—for a small fee, of course.  I, for one, have found it almost impossible to sleep with a dinosaur in my ear.
    Most mornings, I’m up by about six, but once in a while, I get a Saturday when nothing is pressing, and I want to lie in bed.  It rarely happens.  My granddaughter is an early riser.  She shows up by my bedside with handfuls of various objects meant to persuade me to get up-and-at-em. 
    This morning, she was wearing panties and a Hello Kitty gown, accessorized with a Hello Kitty top hat and purple Rapunzel socks.  She arrived at my bedside with a purse full of jewelry and various other tools of her trade.  Her purse is like one of those clown cars filled with unbelievable numbers of objects.  It is akin to the kits government agents carry in order to ply national secrets from enemy combatants. 
    I was sleeping, as I often do, on my stomach with my right arm slung up over my pillow, covering my face.  That simply wouldn’t do.  She moved that arm to my side where she put an Elmo ring on my finger and a silver bangle on my wrist.  Because the jewelry barely solicited a moan from me, she brought out the big guns—several dinosaurs which she lined up on my back and one triceratops she lodged in my ear.  That got my attention.
    Occasionally, my granddaughter shows up with objects that are intended to shock rather than annoy.  Although we strive to keep potentially dangerous implements out of her reach, she somehow gets hold of them.  Particularly memorable was the morning I opened my eyes to find her leaning over my face with a Phillips head screwdriver. 
    My granddaughter comes by her special skill set honestly.  Her mother, my daughter, was the same way.  My daughter was usually up by five-thirty every morning.  She would bang on the head board with a pink Frisbee, chanting, “Get me cereal!  Get me cereal!”  She would drag a chair from the kitchen into my bedroom closet, where I kept her dresses, and rummage through the collection until she found an outfit that suited her.  She screeched hangers against the metal rod and bumped and slung things around until I could no longer tolerate the mess I was seeing in my mind’s eye, and I would get up just to prevent more chaos.  (My oldest sister once told me that God puts difficult people into our paths to keep us from sleep walking through life.  She has no idea!)
    If you could watch my granddaughter sleep, you would wonder how she even functions during the early a.m. hours.  When she and her mom and I were on vacation, she insisted on sleeping in my bed.  Several times during the night, I would either have to pull her back from the edge of the bed to prevent her from falling or I would have to climb out of bed and move to the opposite side to prevent her from kicking me onto the floor.  Each morning she awoke bright-eyed and raring to go.  As for me, I moved at the pace any sleep-deprived person would move.
    You know, I think there’s a whole niche the makers of alarm clocks have over-looked.  Instead of clanging bells, annoying beeps or train whistles, they should implement toddler tactics.  Alarm clocks are meant to be alarming, and I know of little else that would be as alarming at five a.m. as a hologram of a two-year-old wielding a screwdriver while chanting, “Get me cereal!”