R is up around 6, showers, dresses, wakes me by 7. V is usually up by now, but not this morning. She was up at 4am last night and I think the night before as well. She'll wake in the night 3 or 4 days in a row, until she's sleep deprived enough that she has no choice but to sleep through for a night or two. She does this in cycles, but doesn't share the secrets of her sleep cycle with us to it's impossible to plan around.
We're perpetually tired. Every morning when I open my eyes my first thought is tonight I'm going to bed early.
I shower and dress quickly, hurrying to be ready before 7:30 when R has to be out the door for work. When I come out of the bedroom they're watching Handy Manny, snuggled on the sofa together. "I'm ready for Mama Style!" I say and plop down on the sofa. Within two minutes I'm handed a cafe-worthy cup of coffee with whipped cream and pumpkin pie spice on top. Then they go back to the kitchen so V can have some baby bird, which is what we call a squirt of Reddi-Whip in your mouth.
After hugs and kisses and whines and cries about wanting Daddy to stay home with us all the time, R leaves for work. V immediately wants to start doing things. All I want to do is drink my coffee. She grabs a yogurt and I get a 10-minute reprieve. She starts chasing the cats - that's my cue to get a move on.
Downstairs to check two email addresses, convos, stats, Twitter, Etsy Treasuries, and update my shop announcement. I should've brought a load of laundry down with us so we can do our one a day as the Fly Lady preaches. I forgot, but I'll do it in a minute...
Upstairs I have a craft ready for V so I can dye wool. Usually it's Playdoh or anything having to do with glue, but today she's super excited about the Fun Fusion beads she got for Christmas. Doesn't take her long to tire of her still-kinda-clumsy fingers knocking the beads off those tiny little pegs though, and she asks me to finish putting them on. Then I iron it, let it cool. It's packaged as a suncatcher, but she calls the big plastic heart a cat toy. She tosses it to Roxy, who sniffs it twice and then continues to snooze.
Next we move to my bedroom, where I spin two really quick and bulky yarns while V crawls around under the quilt pretending she's Baby Wylie, digging a kitty burrow, and having cat fights with a few of her favorite stuffed cats. She takes any scraps of wool I deem unsuitable for my yarn and saves them in a pile on the bedside table for her collection. I contemplate going outside for pictures of the three yarns I have ready to list but it's cold and windy and I've waited too long now - the sun's in exactly the wrong place. Will have to try to remember to do it this afternoon. I think about how nice it would be to have a light box inside my warm little house so I could take pictures anytime, but I know that with my current equipment the photos would just look flat and I can't have that. That would make me crazy. I will brave any temperature to get a shot at the perfect photo. V, on the other hand, would poke her little nose out and decide she'd rather stay in with her cup of hot chocolate and marshmallows shaped like snowmen.
It's starting to feel like lunchtime, so we go to the kitchen to unload the dishwasher from last night...
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I also wrote about my morning routine in July 2008, if you'd like to see how things have changed since then.