Morning Rituals

I love sleep. It’s one of the things in life I really excel at too. I know you are thinking that this is not really a big accomplishment, but this is an important life skill. We need sleep for our brains to function properly and it is not always an easy thing to do. I can fall asleep almost anywhere at any time if necessary. My daughter inherited this gift of being a very heavy sleeper. This makes mornings a challenge. She wakes very slowly and is usually pretty annoyed that I am there disrupting her slumber. I feel her pain, so I am patient. Some mornings are harder than others.

We started today with me asking her to make her bed and go to the bathroom. She replied with “why do I have to pick out my own clothes?” When she is two steps ahead of me complaining about tasks I haven’t even asked her to do yet I know we are in trouble. She eventually came into my bedroom with a pair of underpants and her uniform jumper announcing “I’m ready!” I gently reminded her she also needed a shirt and socks. She decided it was a tights kind of day. Great, stuffing string cheese into a balloon was exactly what I needed to wake me up. Ten minutes later we stood up facing each other, me sweating like a farm animal, as she declared “These are not very comfortable.They are too tight!” Really? Too tight you say? My rebuttal was “They are called tights!” She spun in circles like a cat chasing it’s tail for a few more minutes until she finally managed to straighten out the seam in the back. These are the moments that I just have to take a breath and try not to laugh.

I guess it has to be a little confusing when parents start making demands of their children that they never had before. If someone had come in and dressed me every morning since I could remember I think I would be a little annoyed when they started making me do it myself. She is a lot like me, lazy and stubborn. The prospect of being a big kid is not all that appealing to her. Barking orders from bed is the kind of gig she had planned. She is probably having panic attacks just thinking about all of the other things I am going to start asking her to do by herself. I can just see her imagining how horrible it will be to be totally self-sufficient, brushing her own hair and tying her own shoes. Oh the horror!

Being a parent is a pretty amazing thing, especially when your child is so much like you. You get to go back to those times and relive those moments with all the knowledge you have gained along the way. So on the mornings that my daughter wants to buck the system and do things her own way I try to be patient. I know what it’s like and I really do feel her pain.

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