For the last few months, the daily routine has been as such:

• The girls go to bed at 7 pm
• At around 10:30 pm I tell myself that I need to start winding down and go to bed early, ultimately do anything but, actually go to bed at around 1 am
• Alarm #1 goes off at 6 am for me to take dog out
• Alarm #2 goes off at 7 am which I promptly disable
• Alarm #3 goes off at 7:10 am and I finally get up
• Prepare breakfast for the girls
• #1 usually wakes up by 8 am, promptly comes down to start breakfast
• #2 is woken up five minutes later, promptly brought down to start breakfast
• Dad mode engage

It’s not always easy, but it’s the life of parenting.  I wish just once in my life that someone else would do this for one morning without me having to be out of town, but I don’t foresee that happening anytime soon, so every single day of my life for the last year or so has been like this.  Obviously nothing involving kids lasts forever, and I knew that there would come a time in which the schedule was going to start deviating, and I believe that time has finally come. 

Over the last few weeks, more often than it hasn’t, #1 has been waking up earlier and earlier in the mornings, and it sometimes throws a monkey wrench into my morning routine, since when things go tits up and she decides to not be chill in her room and wait until 8 pm, I have to bring her down lest she wakes #2 up earlier than hoped, and she’s a colossal pill while I’m trying to prepare breakfast.  Some mornings she’s cool with hanging out in her room and calmly peruses books or plays with her stuffed animals, but usually she’s up and announcing to the baby monitor that she wants to go downstairs, or just whining loud enough to where I’m worried she’ll wake up her sister and things will really go poorly.

The easy solution is to just start waking up earlier so that I can have my peaceful mornings of calms before the storms of parenting, but I’m already sleep deprived enough, and I really dread the idea of doing it.  I’d definitively have to go to bed earlier in order to accommodate it, but I already feel like I don’t have enough time to myself as it is, and it’s difficult to want to sacrifice even more time for myself when I already feel like I always sacrifice too much of myself already.

I really am harkened to the days of reading old Calvin & Hobbes comic strips where Calvin starts waking up at ass o’clock on weekends much to the chagrin of his parents, and now I’m the square unnamed dad character.  But the mornings of angsty kid and grumbly dad aren’t good for anyone, and something’s got to give eventually, and realistically speaking, it’s most likely going to be me.