Early moring goings ons

"Mom? I'm really hungry. Listen! My tummy is making a growling sound 'cause it's so hungry."

This unwelcome announcement comes at 6:52am in the morning when already exhausted parents have gotten too few hours of precious uninterrupted sleep. Sleep that would have lasted much longer had the announcer's little sister not decided to jump into her parents bed at 4:00am, and donated the gift of distrubed sleep patterns that only a three year old can give.

"Please.... mommy and daddy are still tired. Can't you go play down in the playroom for a little while."

"But, I'm really hungry. I need lunch."

Now, the three year old wakes up. We try one last time to delay the inevitable.

"Joey, don't you want to come cuddle with us?"

"No. I'm awake. It's wake time."

He goes and looks through the blinds to confirm that there is some form of light to be seen outside.

At this point, I remember that we have someone living in another bedroom of the house... a bedroom that is floors away from us right now... and those floors equate to silence and more sleep for us. So I suggest:

"Why don't you two go and visit Brooke."

The now energized three year old exclaims: "Yeah, Joey, let's go get Brooke!"

So, our two lovely children embark on a quest to find Brooke.

Jess walks into Brooke's room first, and, in an action that my first step-father used to do thats still torments my nightmares to this day, turned on the lights. Now, these are not just normal lights that reside in the ceiling of my old drum room, oh no. I put four of them in there to make sure I could see what I was doing when practicing... and yes, I made sure they were good and bright (ie: high wattage. yeah, I know, not very environmentally conscious of me, but...), something I'm sure Brooke was not too happy about at that exact moment.

"Ouch... Jess... Brooke doesn't like those, can you please turn them off?"

For some reason, us parental types always refer to ourselves in the third person: "Daddy doesn't like it when you talk to everyone on his fire radio", "Mommy doesn't like it when you come to the front door naked when the mailman comes", and now "Brooke wants to sleep a little more."

"Ok"

A very obedient three year old turns off the lights and heads back to pester Brooke some more.

"It's time to wake up Brooke."

"Don't you want to cuddle? Brooke is feeling tired and needs more sleep."

"No, I'm awake now. You can't sleep, it's wake time."

Where's Joey during all this? Brooke heard some noises and asked if he was doing something he should be.

"Nope."

"You aren't playing with Daddy's drums are you?"

"Nope I'm not. And you don't need to come check."

Oh, like thats not an obvious admission of guilt on his part, that we would believe his statements that we should trust him, almost like the statements he'll make when he has had an "accident" in his pants: Joey, are you wet? No. Don't check me.

Now, at this point, I need to break from the story and relay part of a conversation that my wife shared with me about our almost five year old son this past Saturday, while I was away in Kentucky: "... so I walk past the play room, and here I see YOUR son standing in front of the TV. He's taken all of his clothes off and pulled his underwear down to his knees. He's just standing there watching Tarzan. So, I ask him what in the world he thinks he's doing. He tells me that he's 'Tarzan.' He tells me that Tarzan doesn't wear clothes. So I ask why his underwear is down, and he points out that Tarzan wears a loin cloth, so he had to pull his underwear down to look like him. I then pointed out to him that Tarzan's thingy probably doesn't hang out, though. He replies: 'Oh, you're right.'"

Yeah, this is our son. Back to the early morning story.

At this point, Brooke gives up the fight and comes out to find Jess trying to play with drumsticks, and Joey has creatively placed various drum pedals around the electronic drum kit that waits to find a permanent home in our basement (the one consession that my wife made to me when we migrated all of my drums to a climate controlled storage site several weeks prior).

And yes, we're still sleeping away...

We've just successfully tossed our morning wake up calls onto Brooke... hopefully, this will be something we can repeat going forward.

jp