This morning started at 5:39am, about an hour earlier than I would have liked. If I’m being honest, three hours earlier.
I felt the pointed tip of a finger poking my shoulder blade. Too small to belong to a serial killer but bigger than a bed-bug, this had to belong to a child.
Ellie: Mommy, my bed is so comfortable right now, when it’s time to wake up, will you come and get me so I don’t have to get out of it?
That logic made perfect sense at 5:39am. We agreed to her terms with a pinky-swear and off she went, back to the bed she never wanted to leave in the first place.
And yet, I can’t help but wonder if it was all part of a more elaborate scheme to distract me while Hanna slunk down the hall and turned on the t.v.
We have a no t.v. policy on weekday mornings because nobody can get ready for school if the t.v. is on. Sure they’ll promise to do everything necessary, in addition to polishing our shoes and vacuuming the stairs, but the same bite of cereal would disintegrate into unrecognizable mush while droplets of milk land on the plastic Tinkerbell placemats, pupils dilated to the size of those cats with the giant heads on the Dollar Store greeting cards glued to the set if we allowed it. It’s also terrible for their eye health as neither one of them blink from the time the show starts until the first commercial sending them into a tailspin over the latest toy requiring fifteen batteries and a miniature glue gun to keep the parts from cracking, landing them in one of our many toy baskets reserved for partials.
The kids have learned how to turn on the t.v. by studying and then practising the twelve button sequence required to fire it up. If there was a Blue Ray disc in the player from the evening before, those dozen buttons become a different series of nineteen buttons followed by downward dog and child’s pose to regain focus before starting again from the beginning.
Hanna’s teacher commented the day before that school would likely be cancelled due to freezing rain in the forecast so technically, TECHNICALLY Hanna wasn’t breaking the no t.v. on weekday mornings rule, treating the set as her weekend buddy who came up to the big city for a visit a little early.
I was quick to check the bus cancellation news and the bold “All Systems Go” sent the kids into two puddles of deprived toon-time, heaps of broken dreams about broken toys, almost inconsolable.
What I really disapprove of is how they try to hide the fact they’ve been watching t.v. before we come out to the family room in the morning. Sometimes I wonder if Hanna waits until Greg and I are asleep and then sneaks away to watch t.v. all night long. A chance encounter with the tooth-fairy might put an abrupt end to that act of espionage.
Gone are the days we find our girls working on a puzzle, playing Barbies on the bench or intensely turning cards to see if the Jogo would beat the other’s ace in a game of war. That creative play-time has been replaced with a lot of shuffling to turn off the t.v. before they are caught, rehearsing the lies they will tell about how many shows they have already watched and who’s been drinking my ruby-red?
