Morning the Loss

At 4:20 in the morning, it doesn’t sound like the pitter patter of little feet.  It sounds like jack boots.   They come straight to our bed.  The child says, “I’m hungry.  I want to go downstairs.”  There’s less than a 50-50 chance this one will go back to sleep, but we’re still going to try.  “Come cuddle.”  The child’s voice gets louder and more shrill.  “Nooooo, I want to go down.” Now, the stakes are higher because if two get up, nobody sleeps.  “Shhhh, it’s the middle of the night, don’t wake your siblings.  Come cuddle.”  The eye rubbing starts.  “OK.”  We’re beating the odds, this one’s going back asleep after 20 long minutes of tossing and turning.

We’re asleep long enough to start dreaming again, when a voice abruptly insists “I’m hungry!”  It’s 5:02.  “I want to go downstairs, right now!”  Another one marches into the room and the first one jumps from the sound.  It’s over.  “I’m going downstairs.”

That’s not an option.  You can’t leave kids alone downstairs when they have the impulse control of toddlers.  They’ll climb drawers like ladders and pull things onto their heads from high cabinets, pour cereal bowls to the brim with milk, sloshing sticky mess everywhere, eat spoons full of sugar, grind fruit into furniture, break glasses, severely injure themselves with knives, push one another into walls.  These aren’t hypothetical worries, they’ve all happened. 

The thing is, we don’t have toddlers, anymore.  They’ve been “old enough to know better” for years.  In fact, they do know better.  It’s just at 5:00 in the morning, without enough sleep, no food and no medicine in their bodies to help keep control, they will do all of these things.  But four hours of sleep won’t be enough to let mom and dad to do all the things they’ll need to do today.  So, we’ll try to divide and conquer.  We send one to the tv in the attic play room and the other to the sitting room with an iPad. 

It’s not that we can sleep, but we can’t get up, yet either.  There’s a screeching fight in the attic over Lord knows what.  The other one comes by every few minutes like a town crier.  “It’s 5:24… It’s 5:36… it’s 5:38.”  It probably felt like an eternity between announcements for that one.  It’s relative peace, and we’re taking the best we can get until we can muster the energy to get out of bed.

Later today, somebody will ask us why we don’t go out more, at all really.  Somebody will tell us we just need to take some more time for ourselves.  The truth is, we have mornings like this one more often than not and we haven’t even discussed bedtime, yet.  So, poor we?  No.  Sure, mornings stink and lots of other things are hard but even more things are really good.  Just don’t don’t ask us what we’re doing tonight.  Sleeping.  Hopefully!