Early to Rise Challenge: Day 1

Money Saving Mom is hosting a month-long Early to Rise challenge throughout March. It's based on the e-book of the same name, but having no e-reader (sigh) I can't follow along in the book and will be basing my posts entirely on Crystal's daily thoughts on her blog.

I've committed to getting up at 6am every day. That gives me a whole hour to do my physical therapy, take a shower and get most of a quiet time in before the children wake up. It's not really any earlier than I theoretically have been getting up, except my alarm clock (aka: my husband) has been letting me sleep later and later these past few weeks, and I, in my third-trimester weariness, have been letting him.

Today's theme is "Your Mindset Matters." This is going to be one of the biggest challenges for me, since I find the potential of failure to be one of my biggest de-motivators. I think it may take the better part of this challenge to train myself into not making excuses. Which, in a way, is why I signed up for this challenge in the first place. It's going to be good for me. So this morning my husband woke me up at six exactly like I asked, and after ten minutes or so of praying together I did my exercises. This is one of the tougher parts of getting up. I must get them done first thing or I likely won't get them done at all, but they require a large, flat, elevated surface (aka: the bed) for me to complete all the stretches. And half of them must be done lying down. Not getting sucked back into the land of Nod is a real challenge.

I did not get my quiet time done before the kids woke up because I had to complete a button snake for a busy bag swap another mom from my MOPS group organized for this morning. I figured it would be easier to use the sewing machine without two young children romping around. And because I was up late doing the first half of the button snake (I know; it was not the best way to start and early-rising challenge, but I forgot about the swap until I got the reminder email on Wednesday), I fell asleep for fifteen minutes halfway through my quiet time. Oops. And obviously the morning was busy enough that I didn't post at anything like a reasonable hour.

In all, I think it was a decent start. I got a fair amount of stuff done throughout the rest of the day, and I learned a valuable lesson about committing to a decent bedtime in addition to a bright-and-shiny waketime. I'm still pondering some of my other "excuses" I have for not waking up early (such as if I get up with my husband, I tend to bother his quiet time and then neither of us accomplishes much, and the fact that I've got third-trimester fatigue and pregnancy anemia and really do need as much extra rest as I can get) and wondering which are really "just excuses" and which are realistic boundaries I must set for myself. So far, I don't have any easy answers.