Moose Interrupted

For those of you who lack offspring, I will share with you a little hint. The key to running a household with smaller, cuter versions of yourself is routines. Routines for dinner. Routines for getting ready in the morning. Routines for those rare moments where you're in a public place and someone puts on a show tune ("That's it pumpkin - now jazz hands!").

Well, as the official morning person of the household, I'm responsible for packing lunches and then waking, dressing, and/or feeding the tots before school, and we have a well established routine. A big part of that routine is me nagging after the Princess, who tends to forget what she's supposed to be doing in favor of a shiny object (awww...just like her daddy). The point is that it works, and those who know me know that being late to anything makes me a little crazy, so it works well. Typically, we're ready with about ten minutes to spare.

What's odd about this is that one would assume that having help would improve said routine. Unfortunately, there's a kink in the system where that doesn't work. See, a big part of my morning routine is letting the Moose sleep until the last minute, throwing his clothes on, brushing his teeth, combing his hair, and then rushing everyone out the door, where we proceed to his daycare and they give him the bowl of cereal I packed. I used to get him up for breakfast, but when I tried to wake him he would just mumble and roll over, and if I forced him out of bed he would be all cranky with me (awww...just like his mommy). So now I let him sleep, and it has worked out way better than I ever expected, but it relies on one little element that's sometimes out of my control.

His mother has to be gone before I wake him up.

Well, last night my lovely daughter woke at four in the morning complaining of a stomach ache. After trying using the bathroom, drinking a glass of water, elevating her (she has a history of reflux), suggesting that she try to burp or release gas some other way, she was still complaining. Then she started throwing up, which pretty much went on until she was empty. As a result, mommy stayed home to stand watch over our Princess.

Unfortunately, that meant the Moose got mommy time. Now, I never begrudge him his adoration of his mother as it's something we share, but all morning when I took him away to try and brush or comb or whatever, the little bugger wailed like I was pulling out toenails. When I dropped him off at school, he was still huffing a little from the crying fit in the car, and when I handed him off, the wailing began again. At first his teacher suggested that maybe he wasn't feeling well either, because this is very unlike our normally docile Moose. I explained that mommy was home, and that he had been going on since I took him away from her. "Oh," the teacher said, "well that's probably it. He does the same thing when she drops him off." I get a wave and smile, and then it's on to the aforementioned Cheerios that await him for breakfast.

So yeah, I need to work on the whole "when mommy's home" branch of the morning routine. Hearing my babies cry makes me feel bad, and given that I was running behind today and so skipped my coffee, it added to a mounting caffeine headache that was building to Scanners proportions. The problem is that once I've got a good routine, I tend to only change it grudgingly. I don't know. Maybe I can come up with something.

You think that maybe I could convince her to hide until we're gone?