A morning of disorientation, tears and minor failings. Bet you’re interested now …

So yesterday I wrote about my ‘morning shift’ plan and promised to inflict daily updates on you all (?) for a short time. Today my goal was to get up at 6:45am. That was it. No writing, no specific plans for the morning; just get up.

So one of the more interesting fails of yesterday was my success in setting a completely silent alarm on my phone: it went off at the required time, just didn’t make any sound, didn’t vibrate, didn’t do anything other than say ‘Alarm’ on the home screen. Turns out this is what happens when you set ‘No sound’ on your alarm. Go figure.

I concluded that this probably wasn’t the best technique for getting myself out of bed in the morning and experimented last night. Eventually I found that you *have* to set a sound even if you want your phone alarm only to vibrate, Furthermore, even if you have your phone set to mute, you will still get the alarm sound.

(Why do I not want a sound? Because I don’t want to wake up my toddler, who currently sleeps in the same room as we do. If he wakes up then much of the reason for getting up early is blown.)

Anyway, having figured out how to set my alarm correctly I ended up completely failing to actually set my alarm correctly. Instead I woke up at 6:15am, absolutely convinced that it was past 7:30am and I had dismally failed to get up at the required time, promptly fell back to sleep, didn’t hear my completely silent, non-vibrating alarm, and woke up again just before 7am. Not a complete disaster, but less than a roaring success given I was aiming for 6:45am.

I did manage to get up then, but the toddler woke up as I was creeping out of the bedroom and demanded a banana. Ultimately my morning ended up being an extra half hour of trying to tend to a slightly-under-the-weather two-year-old while making my other son’s lunch, eating my breakfast and getting said toddler ready for daycare (“No! Don’t want to get dressed!”, “No! Don’t want a clean nappy!”).

I *was* going to write about how good I felt after getting up early yesterday but it’s quite possible that might have been an aberration, so I’ll give it a few days yet.

6:45am tomorrow – bring it on!