I woke up this Morning with kisses and hugs and a sweet little voice said, “Good morning mommy, I love you.” It’s an amazing way to start the day, but it wasn’t always like this.
Here’s something they don’t tell you when you have a baby – they may hate waking up. Every morning until he was about 3 years old, my son would wake up screaming and angry. He was the WORST morning person! I dreaded waking up and dealing with the drama every single morning. I’m not exaggerating. Every morning I’d wake up and just try and soak up a few extra minutes of sleep while waiting for the screaming to start. I hated life just a little bit Every. Single. Morning.
Nobody ever told me about that. They also neglected to mention they might wake up screaming mad from naps too. You’d think a nap would be refreshing, but no. It was almost as if he was angry he fell asleep and might have missed something. It was so bad that when it became a fight to get him to take naps that I gave up the whole ordeal. Why fight for 45 minutes to get him to sleep, then have him sleep for maybe an hour, only to have him wake up even more wound up than before? And want to stay up later? Nope. Not worth it.
It finally changed a little just after he turned three, when we switched to the toddler bed that he could get out of on his own. Then every night, around 2AM, he’d come screeching into our bedroom and demand to be picked up and placed into our bed. He’d bring two blankies and two stuffed animals at a minimum. And if any dropped along the way, or he forgot them, he’d wail until I got up and went to his room to retrieve them.
Around this time he switched from a morning meltdown to just demanding we “GET UP” as soon as the first wee bit of sunshine cracked through blinds. It wasn’t a request, and it wasn’t said sweetly. He would basically just yell “Get Up” at us until we succumbed to his unrelentless torture and got the hell out of bed.
And through all this, all the screaming, all the demanding and all the awfulness, I would tell him “Good Morning Keelan, I love you.” Every morning, just hoping it would sink in and maybe one day I would hear it back.
And now I do. Now that he’s four, he wakes up with a smile that makes me smile. He still sneaks into our bed every night, but he does it quietly for the most part, without a lot of fuss, and goes right to sleep. And I enjoy waking up with him so much that if I wake up first, sometimes I stay in bed just so I am there when he opens his eyes and smiles at me to tell me those words I waited so long to hear: “Good Morning Mommy, I love you.”
*So there’s hope for those of you that may be going through this now
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