Even though I don’t have to be at work until 9:30 am, my son has decided that his wake-up time is 6:45 am. This may not sound like an ungodly hour to all you morning people who have to show your face in the office at 8 am sharp, but my one compensation for that six years of the social black hole we call graduate school is the fact that I have a great deal of autonomy when it comes to setting my hours. Lord knows it isn’t the money.
We have discovered that no amount of fiddling with his bedtime the night before is going to change his internal alarm.  The net result is only a change in his mood when his eyes pop open at the inevitable time. Sometimes, you just have to have the serenity to accept the unchangeable. Serenity, before 7am, is hard for me to come by.
It is certainly possible to alter my hours by an hour. Probably half of my co-workers work an earlier “shift”, and much of my clientele is on Eastern time anyway. But over the last few weeks I have started to covet those early morning hours in the quiet house. They have taken on the character of “stolen time”. I can play with my son. I can run a load of laundry or wash dishes at the open kitchen window. I can sit on the deck in the cool morning breeze and sip my coffee while my son sings to himself in his playhouse, our terrier chasing the squirrels through the shade of the oak trees.
This morning, as Harry followed me to the sink to clear his breakfast dishes, he spied his bubble gun on the windowsill. He put up his hands and stomped his feet.
“Bub-boos! Bub-boos OUT-side! OUT-side!”
 And he ran to the door and looked back at me expectantly.
So for thirty minutes in the cool green shade, I watched my son turn circles in a cloud of rainbow bubbles, his face upraised, his eyes closed. In the silence of the morning, I could hear the soft “puck! puck!” of them raining down on the deck, on his playhouse, on the patio chairs. And a sudden updraft caught them and they floated upward, into the rays of sun filtering through the trees and the blue, blue sky beyond.
“Fly ‘way!” Harry shrieked as he stretched his arms to the sun.
Fly away, indeed.
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I too love those stolen moments in the morning. Sometimes, I get 10 minutes to myself after returning from dropping her off at daycare, and before I have to walk to the train. Those 10 minutes can feel like a day. Peace. A cup of coffee. Maybe a moment to read my email.
I never thought that I could enjoy getting up at quarter after six, but since I have been going to bed so early it is less of a problem. I quit fighting it, since there is no way these kids are ever going to sleep in.
Lovely post. My very, VERY early in the morning time is often my only time alone with The Baby and so I do sort of treasure it, in a sleepy way.
The biggest regret that I have about when my kids were little was that I didn’t write down all of those wonderful everyday moments. Kids are just amazing. You think you will remember everything, but you don’t. You mean to write it down, but you don’t. My kids are almost 11 and 8 and I feel like I have lost so much by not writing it down.
I read your posts and think how wonderful it is that you are capturing these moments to hold on to forever. I hope you have a backup disk with all of your posts about Harry, just in case. When you read your posts ten years from now, you will cry.
Perhaps it’s not too late for me. My kids still do cute and amazing things, it’s just not as frequent as when they were little. I think I will have Paul set me up a website.