How to wake up children without crying

Being a certified Grumpy Morning Person seems to have given me extra motivation to find a way to awaken our children — as well as myself — as painlessly as possible.

I have never been good at waking up in the morning. As a child, I had the distinct disadvantage of having no bedtime. “Fun!” one might say — until the time comes to get up and go to school. When I was a child, my mother would sometimes sing “The Indian Love Call” to me or play the piano to wake me up and I would weep, plugging my ears against the invasive morning racket. I have clear memories of walking downstairs in my pajamas, curling up on a green vinyl kitchen chair like a contortionist, and sleeping right through breakfast. In high school, my friend Melanie and I had the bright idea to wake up at 5:45 am and go swimming before class — a practice which sometimes worked as planned, but more often found us asleep in the school parking lot, warmed by the heat vents in my velour-upholstered 1977 rusty gold Cadillac or sacked out on one of the cushions in the school newspaper office.

Sleeping Lucy.

When our daughters were born, I had serious questions about my ability to be awake and alert in the mornings, particularly because I had kicked the caffeine habit about five years prior to Lucy’s birth during a lengthy struggle with insomnia. Lucky for me, one of Jon’s many virtues is that he is a morning person, and he loves me, so he would take the morning shift as often as he could — bless his heart. Somehow the oxytocin must have gotten me through the rest of those mornings.

But enough about my sleep. Suffice it to say, I have a long history with problematic mornings, so I really wanted to figure out a way to help our daughters wake up without too much torment. “Why wake them up,” one might ask, “since you are not sending them to school?” True, we don’t usually have morning obligations, but we do sometimes, and even on home days, it helps to have everyone awake at a reasonable hour so that everyone is tired for bed at a reasonable hour. So this is what we do:

We read poetry.

On most mornings, I wake up about an hour and a half before the children in order to shower, dress, have a cup of tea and some “quiet prayer time”:/news/2013/return-of-the-quiet-time/. Then I wander into their room, open the curtains, and kiss them good morning before sitting down in a chair and grabbing our latest book of poetry. In the wintertime, I may need to turn on a light (gently! preferably with a dimmer!) in order to see the page in front of me. Then I proceed to read a few poems. The best ones are funny (Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky are favorites), and illustrations are a non-negotiable, for that is truly what drives the children to open their eyes. After each poem, they must struggle to lift their heavy heads from their pillows to study the artist’s rendition of the man who has forgotten to put on his pants or the ogre eating Scream of Wheat for breakfast. This, apparently, is motivation enough when you are five and seven years old.

This little ritual adds about 10-15 minutes to our morning routine, but it is well worth it, and often one of my favorite parts of the day. Mornings are still not completely free of grogginess. On the worst days, we need to push to get dressed and have breakfast before The Crankies get us. But most of the time, everyone wakes up without tears, which is a lot more than I can say for my own childhood.
Morning sleepyheads.

And what about Mama, you might ask? What in the world gets her out of bed 90 minutes before the children wake? Especially in the dead of winter, when 6:15 am arrives black as midnight? I do have a secret weapon — we call it “The Reverse UnDimmer”:http://amzn.com/B00AXL8Q02. This ugly and clunky light fixture attachment clicks on at 5:45 on the dimmest setting and gradually brightens over the next 30 minutes, saving me from the offensive task of sudden blinding morning light bulbs. It really makes a surprisingly big difference, especially when combined with my human alarm clock, Jon Boyd. I have discovered that, in the summer months, I am somehow able to wrench myself out of bed, throw on my running shoes, and hurl myself into the sunny 70-degree weather for a two-mile loop with remarkable results. But winter mornings can be so violently cold that they require a bit more gentleness, preferably in the form of an artificial sunrise and a hot shower, followed by tea, quiet time….and some poetry.

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