Scraps of Frosting

Extra snooze minutes are like scraps of frosting for me.

I just can’t resist them.

Try as I might, it is a big struggle for me to get up in the mornings. I crave leisurely slow mornings where the sun makes a big appearance and has to shines forcefully on you telling you to wake up. I love slow summer days where hours blend into each other seamlessly.

Mornings where the sky has not broken into its true blue, where the sun isn’t truly shining yet, turn out to be mornings where the snooze button being pressed repeatedly.

When I taught 2nd grade, I had to show up at work daily at 7:15 a.m. Ouch! Now, I wish I appreciated the effort parents made to get their children there on time!

Today was Z’s first day in Kindergarten which meant we had to rise early.

It meant we had to resist the extra snooze minutes or diet from the extra scraps of frosting. It meant I had to cook the eggs quickly on high and make sure to not burn them. It meant everything done at a quicker speed, no summer lingering anymore. I guess if I had the willpower to get us all awake early then we could linger as much as we wanted, but our extra few minutes in bed were too precious to swap out for linger minutes. So rush we did!

When you’re around your children, you’re always responsible for them. For making sure they are polite, for making sure they take the last few bites of their egg, for brushing their fly-away hair out of their eyes.

I noticed when I taught 2nd grade when a mother would stop by, their reactions to their child were like clockwork. A quick hug or smile, a quick straightening of a hair ribbon, or a flattening of hair. A mother is a child’s groomer. Who else will do all these things if a mother is not there? As a teacher of 20 students, you can’t be straightening hair ribbons all day, so that is what mothers or fathers or caretakers are for, right?

When your child is off in full-time-school, you’ve released your little one, your chick from your cozy nest of home, and all you can do now is hope and pray all will go well, and find beauty in your leftover eggshells and offspring!