on rainy Monday mornings

It's a rainy Monday morning, and somehow there are candles lit, soft music a background to children playing and studying and working, laundry whirring in the machine, and peace reigns.  Remarkable.

I am not a morning person.  NOT.  So (this will sound like backward logic, but stick with me) I have to get up early enough to have some time to myself before I start my jobs (mothering, homeschooling) just like I did before children, when I left home to work.

So I get up at 5:30 (well, 5:42 by the time I'm done hitting the snooze button) to give me time to shower (which is to say, "wake up"), read my Bible (or something "inspirational", which yes, is sometimes email or facebook), make and eat breakfast with my Farmer, and have a few minutes to [eat our chocolate allotment and] chat a little before the troops descend.  At which time I go get Lil' Snip, still miraculously confined to his crib.

The troops, sometimes also referred to as children, wake up between 6:30 and 7, but our mantra is "morning time is quiet time" (to keep Mommy sane, basically), so they may read quietly in their beds (Bibles, Bible storybooks, etc.) until 7, then they dress and make beds and put away pjs before they come down, by which time I am fully awake (most days) and have hopefully found a good attitude about life.  Lil' Snip, as yet unfamiliar with our morning mantra, chooses from an assortment of activities of his choosing:  singing, banging on walls, thumping feet on crib, telling stories to his bear, exclaiming over something he can see from his window, or wailing for no discernible reason.  He also showed me yesterday how he lies on his back and kicks his feet in the air.  Never at a lack for entertainment, that one.

Not the system for every family, I know, but it works well for us, keeps Mommy out of professional therapy, and helps the children's mornings to go more peacefully, too.

It hasn't always worked so smoothly.

In the pre-reading era, a lot of intervention was needed.  Certain sisters hit and/or taunted certain other sisters.  Certain sisters tattled.  Certain sisters wailed with remarkable volume and intensity.  Loud thumps startled my Farmer and me from our coffee.  I despaired of ever, ever, EVER enjoying mornings.

But, little by little, we have somehow, by God's most generous grace, been insistent on our standards for mornings, and now it is hard (and yes, almost humorous) to remember those infuriatingly tumultuous mornings of so long ago (oh, say, last year).

Of course, now that I wrote this, tomorrow morning may be a crazy-maker ..... but I'll be able to read this and remember that peace is likely to reign again, someday ....