Day 9: Early To Bed And Early To Rise

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Intro: The 12 Days Of Christmas Memories
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Closing
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It is now four sleeps until Christmas. Wait, don't I mean days? No, I mean sleeps. I realized long ago that the most difficult part of waiting until Christmas wasn't the days, during which I could play with my brothers, but it was having to clear my mind and fall asleep each night. Thinking about the Lego sets or Sega Genesis games I was hoping to receive, well, it kept me up at night! So I was painfully aware of how many times I needed to conquer those thoughts and get to sleep.

On the last day, Christmas Eve, I would find my excitement peaking, and the puzzle-solver in me realized that if I could achieve that last sleep earlier, Christmas Day would effectively arrive sooner. So I started to go to bed early on Christmas Eve. Really early. What was surprising about this is that it actually worked -- as I resolved to do, I did fall asleep earlier. What was not surprising is that, as a consequence of falling asleep earlier, I also woke up earlier. Much earlier.

Like everyone has, at one time or another I've made the joke, "I didn't know there was a five-o'clock in the morning." The truth is, of course I knew there was a five-o'clock in the morning, I just didn't know it was soooooo long. What was I supposed to do at 5:00am on Christmas morning? I couldn't do anything that made noise, because I would wake people up, and as a kid I had very few things in my repertoire that didn't involve making noise. So I did the only thing I could think of: I read. And what I decided to read was the dinosaur book.

Our dinosaur book -- out of print, but if you're interested, ISBN 9780307137647 -- stands out because of its vivid drawings; its timeline at the bottom of each page that, across the entire book, spans the entire Mesozoic Era; and its depiction of all dinosaurs as cold-blooded...yeah, so it's a little dated. It seems it has just the right amount of science nerdage to keep me mildly captivated through the entire book...which would take me a surprisingly long time to get all the way through. Perhaps I would daydream in the middle of the T-rex battle scene.

These days I still get teased on Christmas Eve -- "It's 9:30, shouldn't you be in bed?" -- and on Christmas Day, Mom may ask whether I read the dinosaur book. I keep it at my place these days, so when I'm out at Mom and Dad's for Christmas, I don't have that option. If I want reading material, I have to choose from among whatever has accumulated at the house over the years -- classic literature and books on programming. Hmmm...maybe Allison has something I could borrow. Harry Potter once fought a dinosaur, right?