Morning Person

We struggle with keeping Noble in bed past 5:00 am, anyway, and this time change has shot that all to pieces.  So today I had my coffee and quiet time while he played Angry Birds Star Wars (it's finally here!!!) beside me.

Whenever he gets up early, it throws off our schedule.  I like to get up, have coffee (that my Boy makes and brings to me every day, so spoiled!), and have my quiet time before I get online and check e-mail, check facebook, and do a little work before 6:30.  (That's the time that we drop everything and start getting ready for the day...any later and things get too hairy around here!)  James does his own version of morning quiet time in the office and usually gets in a little work time, too.   It seems Noble wakes up the neediest on the days that James has the most work to do.  Isn't that just how kids are?

But this week, with the time change, I haven't been making Noble go back to bed like we were doing before--he's ready to get up.  His body thinks it's past 6:00 (or six-oh-oh, if you're Bubby).  And we can always use the extra cuddles.

Because it won't be long until he's cool like his big sister, and cuddles are few and far between.  These mornings will be just a memory.


It's very clear that Noble's a morning person and Kayci's an afternoon person.  I get my best quality time with Bubby before the world wakes up, and my best quality time with Bitty after school and before the bedtime rush.  So as much as I'd like to pack those times with my agenda, I work to make time for the knuckleheads.

When is YOUR kid's time?  If you don't know, take a look at the day.  When does he/she talk to you the most?  Open up about what's going on?  One of my cousin's kiddos would only open up at bedtime, so she always made sure to take a few minutes to go sit on his bed before he went to sleep.  I didn't understand that until my Bitty got older...I wondered why they didn't just talk during the day.  Now I get it...kids talk when they talk.

Now, I will say this, too:  we have to train our kids to talk, sometimes. Around here we ask two questions every day:  in the morning, "what does your day look like?" and in the evening, "what was the best part of your day?"  "I don't know" isn't an acceptable answer for the second.  When we have friends over they tend to look at us like we're crazy when we sit around and talk about our days, but I think it's important.  No, scratch that, I believe to the very core of my soul that it's important.  It doesn't take long for distance to build between two people...when James and I get busy and quit asking each other about work, before long we quit asking each other about other things or mentioning little things like what we need from the grocery store--then we end up arguing and starting from scratch.  Communication is so, so important to keep relationships and families healthy.

Not sure why that's on my mind today, but there it is.  Talk to your kids, folks.  Talk to your partner.  Before you talk to any of them, talk to your Father.  That's a post for another day, but I'm a big believer in starting the day on the right foot, in prayer and in the Word.  My day just goes better when I'm following His agenda, not mine.  But again, that's a post for another day.

It's 6:30, time to pry the iPad away from Noble and get ready for our day.  He doesn't know it, but he's about to take a pic for a little happy's Facebook page this morning.  :)