Sleepy, irritated, groggy, annoyed, angry. This is how I woke up to my almost 1.5 year old this morning, when she decided to wake up at the time listed above.
Man I was so tired from going to bed late, I just wanted to get a little more sleep, which has been alluding me lately. Just 30 more minutes, please?
Usually I would snuggle with her and hope that somehow she would get the hint and go back to sleep. This morning, I was not in the mood to have her crawl all over my face, while attempting to sleep and obviously not sleeping. So I laid her back down in her cot and she cooperated for 30 minutes, but I was already awake...
Typically when my youngest wakes up at the ridiculously odd hours of before 6:30 a.m. I'm cussing.
ALOT.
Sometimes in my head.
Embarrassingly I have to admit, more often than not outloud. :(
I've come to really hate waking up with kids at these early times in the day, especially since I don't sleep well in the first place.
This morning was not different. I started to feel the typical swell of the emotions mentioned above. I picked my daughter up out of her cot and grudgingly took her to the bathroom so we could be in a place she wouldn't wake the others. As I sat on the floor feeling sorry for myself and being angry of the injustices in this world. Thinking all these awful thoughts of how it must be nice for the other two members of my family to be sleeping still. How it was such a burden on me to have to deal with my littlest one this early in the morning. Then something happened, internally. A light came on in my head and I realised that I should be thankful for this moment. I sat there staring at my little one, who was working so hard on her walking and picking up stuff and trying to snuggle her angry mother, and my heart melted. I realised that she isn't doing this to make me angry, this isn't her way of maliciously ruining my day. She is just excited about life and trying to love me the way she knows how. It was at this moment I decided that I have to be excited about life for her too. Every moment, everyday, all the time.
When we choose to have children (consciously or unconsciously), we are deciding at that moment that we no longer want to be alone. We are deciding that we want to have another person to cherish and love and appreciate all to ourselves. We hope they will return the sentiments eventually, but how can they if we don't show them how to in the first place.
Being a parent is the toughest job in the world, it is 24/7, eventually it becomes less stressful or maybe it's just a different kind of stress. You will always have thoughts of your children, even when they are grown, even when they move out and start their own family. The responsibilities may lessen as they learn to care for themselves, but they will always be in your heart.
Everyday we wake up we are given the choice of how we will embrace our day. We CHOOSE at the moment we open our eyes how the tone of our day will be for us and how it will affect those around us.
I want to CHOOSE positive, happy, excited. I want to choose those things so I can feel good and so my family can feel good.
Enjoy these moments when they are given to you. Embrace today with positive, happy, excitement.
These moments won't last forever.
For those of you with young children, how do you handle these early morning wake up calls? For those of you with grown children or no children at all, how to you choose to influence those around you? What do you do to help create the tone of your environment? How can you improve on this?