Grasse Matinée

I had big plans to make big plans for Friday night. I would call a copine, we would get margaritas or kir or some other girly cocktail and talk, talk, talk about our holiday vacations. Then it would be getting late and we would be getting hungry, so we would go find yummy food and order une bouteille de vin and talk, talk, talk some more until it was time to call cabs and fall into bed.  Copain had man-plans with Chinois (TV, beer, etc), so it was the perfect night for me to have girl-plans. 

At 10am, I thought I should send a text to my copine. But I didn't because my coffee had yet to kick in.

At 2pm, I thought I should send a text to my copine. But I didn't because I was in a food coma from lunch.

At 5pm, I thought, who am I kidding? I'm exhausted. I'm going home for pjs, Sex and the City and a junk food dinner. 

So I did.

Despite my heavy eyelids and very clear exhaustion from a 2-week family holiday, flight across the Atlantic and M-F work week of playing catch-up, I somehow stayed awake until 1:30am, blogging and watching Extraordinary People on Youtube (rare case of identical quad babies?!! sign me up!). Copain finally came home from man-night and we went to bed, carefully turning off all alarms in the house (we set three - 2 for Copain, 1 for me), so that we could sleep.  

I slept and I slept - no bathroom wake up calls for me - no texts from the United States at 3am - rien. Just lovely uninterrupted zzzzzz... Until I was rudely awoken by the beats of a faux - disco playlist on the other side of our bedroom wall.  Our neighbs had decided that it was party time, apparently - before daylight! I was thisclose to banging on the wall and/or yelling for them to TURN IT DOWN, when I glanced at the alarm clock on Copain's side of the bed... 

11:35am. 

What?!

I did a double-take - still 11:35am. 

Then I checked my cell phone: 11:36am.  Dude. 

Then I fell back asleep.

Copain and I woke up again at 1:00pm... and we didn't get out of bed until 1:30pm. Seriously. We didn't get out of the house until 3pm and we started yawning again at 6pm. Fortunately, we had dinner plans which kept us from biking home and crawling into bed, but that doesn't mean that we didn't think about it. Our Chinese dinner and long walk home from the 9th to the 11th tired us out again and we soon found ourselves back in bed at 11:30pm.  Who are we?????

I decided to set an alarm so that the same thing didn't happen again. Only, at 10am, when the alarm went off, I rolled over, turned it off, and went back to bed - until 12pm. 

The French call this kind of behavior, faire la grasse matinée -  quite literally, "to have a fat morning". In other words, "to sleep in", or "to have a lie-in", as the Brits would say. I'm not sure if Copain and my sleeping habits actually fall into the "fat morning" basket - perhaps a more precise description would be "an obese morning". Seriously obese.

I'm fairly certain that Ethel and our obese-mornings are just the beginning of my fast-approaching 30th birthday. I never believed people when they said that getting older was rough times, but I'm starting to see the phenomenon in a whole new light...(you know, when I actually get out of bed and turn it on).