Tricky One

Today's NaBloPoMo prompt: What is your favorite hour of the day?  

Hmmm.  It would be a lot easier to identify my least favorite hour of the day, which is without question 3:30-4:30PM.  The kids have just gotten off the school bus and are tired, crabby and hungry.  They have homework to do, usually in a rush before we have to leave for some activity or other.  And tempers are short, so there's a lot of bickering going on!  I spend that hour playing a combination of drill sergeant and referee, most days.

However, that wasn't the prompt.  All in all, I think I'd call the hour between 10 and 11PM my favorite.  Himself gets up at 5 on workdays, so he goes to bed early.  I generally turn in at the same time he does, even though I stay up later.  (When it's cold out and he goes to bed before me, the man insists on going to sleep on my side of the bed to keep it warm for me even though I then have to wake him to get him to move over, kind and loving soul that he is.)

After he falls asleep, I spend an hour or so on the iPad, just relaxing in the quiet.  It's "my" time.  Yes,  there are other times of the day when I have no official scheduled responsibilities and the house is quiet (i.e., school hours) but during the day, there is always something that I should be doing.  Some errand(s), some cleaning or housework or garden work, some phone call or important email or something for one of the kids or Himself.  At night, when stores are closed and the people that I would be otherwise calling or emailing--and my family--are asleep, there is no such (mostly self-inflicted) pressure to be productive, nobody interrupting to ask me to do anything or get anything or help with anything.  It's very therapeutic to just be.

“Quiet is peace. Tranquility. Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life. Silence is pushing the off button. Shutting it down. All of it.” Khaled Hosseini, from The Kite Runner