I love October because:

• Both my wife and my daughter’s birthdays are in October (Ami = the 1st, Robin = the 20th)
• October is the month in which Robin and I started falling in love - sort of. (she’ll debate that)
• Pumpkin Pie, Pumpkin carving, Pumpkin EVERYTHING!
• It’s Halloween and all the joyous undead fun that goes along with it!
• FALL (aka the leaves turning colors) begins to settle in for the winter (uh?)
• It rains (a lot here in Portland!)
• World Series (ok, I don’t like Baseball AT ALL but I get hooked on the world series, it’s weird)

There are so many reasons… but the first two are the main ones.  Here’s a pic to prove it!

You can think of it two ways, I suppose. I either went to bed at 11:30 and got up at 4:30; or I went to bed at 10:30 and got up at 3:30. I’m still trying to figure out which one is better… sure they both equal the same total of hours slept, but one makes me feel less tired. Yeah. The 4:30 one. Good thing the time changed…

Who wakes up at 3:30/4:30 in the morning anyway you ask? Amalea. Some would say,

Oh shouldn’t your baby be sleeping through the night by now? I mean, she is 5 months old…

True. But sleeping through the night means 9-10 hours, and to any normal human being (ok, that’s a totally adult biased thing to say, but oh well) that sounds like a lot - but when you go to bed at 7 or 8pm, that means you get up at 5 or 6am. So when Amalea plopped in bed around 7 last night, I should have known an early one was coming.

I don’t mind getting up - well, ok that’s a lie. I only mind because, for me, it’s difficult to fall back asleep once I have gotten up. I would actually rather Amalea wake up before 2am, because it seems like when it’s that early I can fall asleep again, but anything after around 3 - I’m up for the day. Which sucks, considering today is Sunday (church day) and one of three days I actually need some rest… which is usually the way it works because my mind is racing the night before I have to be speaking or leading worship or doing youth ministry in general.

I miss sleeping in. I know it’s lazy of me to say, but I miss not rolling out of bed until 8 or 9. I love my baby, but I miss sleep. It’s hard not getting enough sleep… harder still for me, I think. I would hear of my friends in college staying up until all hours of the night (2, 3, even 4am) and then getting up for classes the next morning… I could never relate. If I didn’t get 8 or 9 hours a night, I was tired the next day - and not just tired, but the groggy/can’t concentrate/want to kill people tired. Yeah, it was bad. So now it’s really hard, especially when I am trying to do my job, to build relationships with teenagers, and I am struggling to stay awake. Everything in me wants to have energy, be fun, and keep conversation - but my mind feels like mush.

Well… earlier today I felt like there was so much more to say; and more interesting stuff to say then what I’ve said. Oh well… I just felt like I needed to write. I needed to get some of these words out that are stuck just beneath the surface.