Rise and Shine

I like to tell people that Laylee sleeps in until 8 or 9 every morning but to be honest, that's not the whole truth anymore. It is something but the truth. It's more like a fantasy, a version of reality that makes my heart feel happy, a memory of what it was like before the sun started rising at 4 a.m.

Sometime between sunrise and stupid o'clock in the morning, Laylee wakes up for the first time. She then either climbs quietly into bed with me and Dan, plays in her room for several hours, or scrubs the bathroom sink with antibacterial hand soap and a Sesame Street washcloth. It is a peaceful life and I normally don't have to get up until 8 or 9 when the granola bars I keep by my bed are no longer breakfast enough or Magoo starts calling, "GOUT, GOUT, GOUT!" from his wooden prison.

It's simpler and sounds far less neglectful if I just say, "Oh. She gets up around 8 or 9," because she does actually get "up" at around that time.

Now, there's some part of me that says I should be a crack-of-dawn mother, a waiting-up-at-5 a.m.-with-fresh-muffins-and-a-smile mother, a mother whose hair billows out in a perfect sphere around her head, a mother who always smells like cinnamon or Play-Doh or homemade organic soap.

I am not that mother. I think Laylee would be alarmed if she woke up in the morning and found me conscious. "What are you doing up? Are you sick? "Did the fish die?" I often spend the morning with my hair in the ponytail I slept in and I smell like the slightly-better-than-B.O. deodorant I got on clearance a while back and Eggo waffles.

My problem with mornings stems from three things:

1. I like my husband — Dan and I stay up way too late together every night, each waiting for the other one to lay down the smack and say it's time for bed.

2. My kids are entirely too easy to get along with — Laylee believes us when we tell her at 7 a.m. that it's still the middle of the night and Magoo will go to sleep pretty much on demand. (See exhibit A above.)

3. I don't have enough children — obviously, if I had enough kids, maybe 6 or 14, I'm sure I'd be up all night every night with one of them and then I'd always be there waiting with muffins or Red Bull or something whenever the others stumbled downstairs for breakfast.

So Dan and I need to fight more, spoil our children, or just make more babies. Somehow I thought motherhood would automatically turn me into a morning person but it really hasn't happened yet. It hasn't made me want to wear floral jumpers either.

Visit Daring Young Mom's personal blog