Nathan is more of a morning person, very much like his daddy. Paul practically jumps out of bed in the mornings, jumping for joy and whistling. Yes, you read that correctly. He whistles in the morning. I, on the other hand, have to will myself to sit up and slowly crawl out of bed. I’ve never been much of a morning person. Instead, I am a night owl. I love to stay up really super late and then sleep in. But with a kid, of course, that is out of the question. Not gonna happen. So I go to bed early enough to get just enough sleep to satiate my body’s desire for rest, but invariably not quite enough to keep me from being a bit grumpy for the first little while.
Nathan’s mood varies in the mornings. Most times he wakes up all jolly and full of rainbows and lolly pops. Other times, he wakes up grumpy and irritable. Full of “piss and vinegar” as the saying goes. He’s hard to deal with on those days, and it usually takes quite a bit of playing and bribing with books to get him into a better mood. In the picture above, he’d had a great morning. (Fortunately he has those more often than not.) Look at his morning hair! I was sitting on the ground when I took it, so the picture looks like he’s a giant in a tiny little room.
And see the mess behind him? Well, every night before he goes to bed, we clean up his room. And the first thing he does in the morning is drag his toys back out to play. I’ve really been working with him on cleaning up after himself. He and I always clean his room before he goes down for his nap. I set out some baskets, and we sort the toys. Legos here, cars there, blocks in that one, books in this one. Most of the time, he gets distracted and wants to play with the toys we are cleaning up, but I tell him we clean up first and THEN he can play with his toys again. This seems to work well. Just yesterday, he brought a basket filled with over 50 Hot Wheels and dumped most of them onto the coffee table. He played with them for a while, and when he was done –get this– he put them all back into the basket and carried it to his room!
Good work, son.
I know I say this a lot, but I have to say it again. I can’t believe how quickly he’s growing up.
