I’ve never been what you would call a morning person.
Throughout my teenage years, in spite of my mother’s desperate attempts to convey the simple logic of sleeping during the hours when it was dark outside, I’d regularly stay up long past bedtime and then grumble mightily the next morning as my parents wearily tried to haul me out of bed in order to make the school bus.
My night owl ways followed me to college, where I had a bad habit of choosing courses based less on how closely they aligned with my major and more for their post-11am start times.
When I started working my housemates would constantly marvel at my unique ability to set an alarm for eight-fifteen each morning and still make it to my desk showered and dressed by 9am.
Over the years I’ve accumulated a cavalcade of novelty merchandise from friends and relations based on my storied dislike of all things “early”. I’ve got “I Don’t Do Mornings” Mugs, I’ve got a “I’d Like Mornings If They Started Later” t-shirt and I even own a pair of slippers that announces to the world “Don’t Even Look at Me Until I’ve Had My Coffee”.
When I got married and started thinking about having kids my greatest worry was how this long-standing aversion to all things “A.M” would fare against the realities of child rearing. The answer, now that I find myself a parent to three children five-and-under, has been a resounding—NOT THAT WELL.
People had assured me that having children would magically transform me into a morning person!! Those people were, what we call in the vernacular—LIARS.
Having kids has done NOTHING to make me a cheerful early riser. All having children has done is make me into a person who is out of bed at 6:30am each morning like it or not. Each day with the sunrise three small people leap upon my bed demanding food and reciting recent episodes of their favorite TV shows at top volume and, as a result, I find myself reluctantly peeling myself from the sheets in a fog in order to tend to their needs.
This week has been particularly challenging for my three-year-old who has just started potty training. He tends to do fine later in the day, but when it is time to get dressed each morning, he’s genuinely miserable.
He insists, loudly and tearfully as I lay out his clothes that he is NOT, in fact, a big boy. He begs for a diaper and I, determined not to lose ground in the potty training battle, demand that in response that he put on his underwear already and come to breakfast.
It’s been about as fun as it sounds.
This morning as we were launching into what has become our regular morning tussle on the subject, I finally took a step back. I put the underwear down, knelt beside my son and asked him,
“Honey, why is this so upsetting?”
He looked back at me, tears streaming down his face and answered,
“Mom, I’m just really worried that I’m going to get pee pee in my new Spiderman shoes.”
As soon as the phrase was out of his mouth a calm came over him. I told my kiddo that it was OK to feel worried. I told him that sometimes we all feel overwhelmed by things when we first get out of bed and I suggested a compromise.
I put him in some Pampers® Easy Ups and told him he could wear them as long as he needed to. This way, I explained, if he had an accident he didn’t need to worry about ruining his beloved footwear.
My son agreed enthusiastically. We spent the next few hours running our regular training routine. We visited the potty each time the alarm went off. When he tried I praised his efforts, when time he succeeded I rewarded him with a spankin’ new airplane sticker for his potty chart.
By 11am, when things had gone smoothly for several hours, my son let me know that he felt ready to try his big boy underwear for the rest of the day.
I’d learned an important lesson that just because my son wasn’t ready to use the potty at seven in the morning didn’t mean he wasn’t READY. He simply needed a little “safety zone” in Pampers® Easy Ups to fully wake up and regain enough confidence to transition into his underwear.
Because my kid, as it turns out, is just not a morning person.
And if anyone can identify with that – I can.
