My dream Saturday

I have a dream. It’s Saturday morning; the sun kisses the horizon with warmth and colour and somewhere in the house I can smell a fresh pot of coffee and hear the sizzle of back bacon.

My head comes off the pillow and I can just taste that bacon. A dash of Worcestershire sauce and a couple of poached eggs on toast and I’d be there.

But gravity and spring fever conspire like witches to put a spell of drowsiness upon me. In direct contradiction of the new day’s promise, I pull the covers up underneath my chin, roll over and start sawing logs.

It’s what normal people call ‘sleeping in’. In my world it might just as well come under the rubric of things to do when I’m too old to enjoy it.

Every weekend that I’m not working, it’s the same. The positive, wishful thinker in me believes beyond all empirical evidence that the kids will sleep past 6 a.m. and my wife and I will experience what most other people take for granted; a day that doesn’t start at the crack of dawn.

It hasn’t happened since the kiddies arrived, but a guy can hope, right? Last weekend, however, the call came shortly after 5 a.m. when our daughter wanted me to come over and lay with her.

Locomotion at that hour is a challenge, but it pales beside her desire to chat with me about the upcoming day, the previous week and whether we could go downstairs to catch the latest episode of Lunar Jim.

She has no idea that the Lunar One isn’t on until 7:30 and when I inform her of this, she responds pretty much as you would expect. “That’s all right,” she says. “We can draw pictures and you can read me stories until he’s on. Then we’ll eat.”

Actually, she eats. I get to do KP, and I don’t get any coffee rolling until our big boy is up, has had his fruit and sippee of milk, and both of them are satisfied Jim has resolved yet another situation at good old Moona Luna. Small wonder my bagel’s burned black and the coffee’s strong enough to tar the driveway.

What’s worse is the energy surge they experience after eating. They want to dance, for God’s sake, and if I hear “Mambo Number 5” one more time, I think I’ll go nuts. You have no idea how hard it is to sit through eight renditions of that without a single drop of coffee in your system. I would say ‘Hellish,’ but it doesn’t even come close to describing the moment.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the fact they’re real go-getters. I’m that way, too, but just once, one Saturday before it’s all over, I’d like to tuck in and turn over. Bliss, I say. Absolute bliss.

Ha! I must be dreaming already.