You will miss this morning madness

Every parent knows the morning madness. You are trying to rush out of the house but your children just don’t cooperate. The more you nudge them, the slower they move. Nothing seems to go right in the mornings.

This morning, my baby daughter woke up earlier than expected. Then my son refused to let me change his diaper because he wanted to play with his toys. “No, I don’t want to change. Uniform is not my favorite,” he declared. At the same time, my daughter was grabbing my right leg and wailing. I looked at the wall clock. How has it been half an hour already? We are going to be late!

I turned around from my son to pick up my daughter and put her onto my lap. She gave me a happy grin. “What you doing!” my son said playfully to her and giggled. My daughter looked at him, her favorite person, and smiled. I let out a smile, too. We played together for another five to ten minutes before I tried to get my son dressed. It wasn’t entirely without resistance but we got it done and left the house together cheerfully.

Mornings with little children will never be peaceful, calm, and quiet. But do we really want them to be? Do we want them to simply wake up, dress themselves, and file out of the house without speaking a word? Or do we want to play a little, laugh a little, and sigh a little?

When I was living alone, I had the supposedly perfect slow morning. Wake up when I want to, sip a nice cup of coffee, enjoy the morning tranquility. I miss that sometimes. But to give up all I have now just for that? No.

Sure, it can be exhausting doing this day after day after day. But we choose how we want to remember it. If we remember that such mornings are finite and that we will miss them eventually, we might cherish them a little more.

Before we know it, our children will be teenagers and then adults. As Matthew Broderick in the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off said, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."