Time to get up

Getting my 11-year-old son out of bed in the morning takes about half an hour of time and half a stick of dynamite. He's one of those people who simply can / will not wake up, even when they've actually had enough sleep. If you will remember, I'm not one of those people. However, after living with another person for over 30 years who also falls into this category, I do understand the phenomenon. I'm even sympathetic, although I still think that way down deep it has to do with being lazy and weak-willed. (Not really, sweetie! That's a joke! No, really!) In any event, I am my family's alarm clock.

In addition to being very hard to awaken, my son sometimes will strike out physically before he's totally awake. (His mother isn't like that, BTW; she simply fakes being awake until the annoyance trying to waken her leaves.) He's done this for at least 10 years so I've had a chance to learn to dodge on his "physical" days. And since I'm bigger than he is, and he's a lot slower than I am when he's mostly asleep it hasn't really been a problem. Until today. This morning, in the process of waking him up, he managed to catch me totally unaware and bopped me VERY HARD right on the end of my nose. There was then some swearing (me) and some apologizing (him). My nose is not broken (been there, done that, this ain't it) but it does hurt. He and I will have a little discussion - again - about this waking up thing tonight, but I'm also trying to decide between the baseball catcher's equipment and the hockey goalie's equipment for Monday morning.