Internal Alarm Clock A Time Management Tool?

Some of us are blessed with an internal alarm clock. A little voice that wakes you up two minutes before your alarm goes off. This may be a blessing if that little voice also alerts you ten minutes before your son’s soccer game or before the school bell rings. However I don’t have that blessing.

Of course I have the internal ability to wake up 30 minutes BEFORE I have to wake up after only five hours of sleep. Unfortunately that alarm doesn’t seem to carry over into the waking hours. A thirty minute heads up would be handy.

Not having that constant heads up, instead, I wear the super mom cape as I leap over shoes, bags and the cat in a flurry of movement. Knowing full well that the school bell is going to ring in ten minutes and the drive is a minimum of 11 minutes and three seconds if no one is in the cross walk and that light isn’t red. Of course, I will have to drive laps to locate a place I can stop to let my son in. All the parking spots are taken by those nannies with an internal clock.

I thought I had the alarm clock before I had children. As a professional Nanny I was never late for a soccer game, a music lesson, or birthday party. It turns out there are two types of internal alarm clocks. The one reserved for those of us who don’t have children under the age of 18. This one allows you to roll out of bed just before your alarm goes off after a night of 8 hours of restful sleep.

Then there’s the other alarm clock. The one called the mom alarm clock. This internal alarm wakes you up at three minutes before the baby needs to be fed, or two minutes before your toddler wets the bed, or 8 minutes before your five year old wakes up with growing pains. Sometimes these alarms are all in the same night. The mom alarm clock results in a pure hatred of the real alarm clock that wakes you up at 7 am as the children are peacefully sleeping telling you to start your day.

Luckily I have some other time management tips under my cape to keep me on time and organized as a mother. Despite the internal mom alarm clock working against me at night, my children make it to their soccer games and birthday parties, usually with the present and cleats in the bag. Was that the blue bag or the red one?

Kay McFarlane is the designer of the printable mom planner and owner of OrganizedFamilies.com. Her time management skills and humor help her make through each week as the busy mom of three children, contractor, student, and business owner. That same humors and skills are shared each week at her website for busy moms.