“I’m taking Mondays and Fridays OFF!”

Monday morning.  My house.  My younger daughter was already awake and chatting with me, and I said to her, “Hold on a second.  I have to wake your sister up now.  She needs to start getting ready for school.”  My younger daughter glared at me and said with a very serious frown,  “My God wants us to be nice to people.  Waking people up is not nice.  My God does not want you to go around waking up all the people in the house.  Got it?”

Now, I am not a morning person.  I never have been.  On Saturdays, the only day of the week I don’t have to wake up to get people some place, I want to sleep late.  I get very annoyed when people wake me up, and I can understand my daughter’s frustration.  But I am the mom.  It is my job to wake them up in the morning, make sure they eat a good breakfast, wear weather appropriate clothing, brush their teeth, get their hair out of their eyes, remember their backpacks, change their underwear, etc.  So I went to wake up my older daughter.

the breakfast glare 

“I think every Monday should be a half day, but not the kind with no school in the afternoon.  We should have yes school in the afternoon and no school in the morning.”

Yeah, again, I get it.  I really do.  When I was in school, I fought with my mom every single morning.  Now that I am the mom, I can’t help laughing.  I really do laugh.  I know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help it.  The more my daughter fights about waking up in the morning, the harder I laugh.  How can I not laugh at this great cosmic joke?  The girl who would never get up in the mornings, the girl who was always late to school, now has to get up early six mornings a week and try to get a miniature version of herself up and out the door?  It is pretty funny.  Luckily, my daughter is way better than I ever was.  If I walk away for five minutes then come back for her, she is up and ready to go 99% of the time.  And she really does like school, so she is pretty good about going out the door once she is awake.  But for that first five minutes of every morning, I laugh and feel sorry for my mom.