I'm Traumatized From Getting My Children Ready In The Morning

It's 5:45 AM and I hear the creak of my daughter's bedroom door open. Her sound machine is still on. I can hear the fake rain emanating from the distance. Then I hear the thumping of her little feet hit the floor.

She runs directly into my bedroom and proclaims, "Good morning, mama!"

I groggily rub my eyes and muster up a semi-comprehensible response. "Good morning, my love," I muster back. But what I really want to say is "OMG it's so f*cking early. Couldn't you have slept one more hour?"

But I don't.

I get up and go into the kitchen with her. I microwave some frozen pancakes and she eats them readily. All the while, I'm praying my son sleeps a little bit longer. He's not a morning person, thank God.

After I give her the pancakes, I put my coffee mug in the microwave for three minutes to get the water hot enough for the French Press. During this time, I continually anticipate my daughter's impatience and eventual descent from her chair, down the hall toward the living room.

I hope she sits there just two minutes longer so I can have my coffee.

While she chows down on pancakes, I furiously take all my vitamins because I'm old. While shoving supplements in my mouth, I also gather frozen fruit and vegetables and attempt to make a smoothie in my blender. At the sound of the blender doing it's thing, my son wakes up. 

"I wanna watch something!" he proclaims.

"You can't watch TV until you eat breakfast."

We argue about this for about five minutes until he sulks, sits at the table and eats Cheerios without milk.

Once both kids are finished eating, they all run away from me toward the living room and turn the TV on.

"You guys can't watch TV until you get dressed."

There's a lot of whining and protesting. My son then starts negotiating, telling me he will actually die if he's not allowed to watch TV.

I explain to him that no one has ever died from lack of television and that he needs to put his pants no.

He finally agrees. But that's when things get intense.

"I can't find any pants!"

"Look in your drawer."

"There are no pants!"

"If I come in there and find pants, I'm going to be really upset."

"Mommy, help."

"OK, fine."

I go into his room, open the drawer and locate a pair of pants within 2.5 seconds.

"See? Pants."

"I don't like those pants. I want my green pants."

"Those are dirty. I'm doing laundry tonight."

"I want them."

"Well, you can wear them tomorrow. We're late now, you need to put these pants on."

"No."

"Either you put these pants on or I put them on you."

"No."

"If you don't listen to me you're not watching TV tonight."

*crickets*

He decides that TV is worth the sacrifice of putting the pants on. Meanwhile, my daughter chases the cat down the hall, and if and when she catches the poor feline, she's pulls the creature's tail.

"Stop pulling the cat's tail! That hurts her."

"OK," she says with a sigh.

While I'm disciplining my kid for animal cruelty, my son has taken his pants off in protest.

"Remember what I said about TV?"

"Yeah."

"Put your pants back on."

*crickets again*

At this point, I still have pajamas on. I go to put my clothes on, praying that he'll be ready to go when I'm finished. Meanwhile, my daughter has taken all the Dixie Cups out of the bathroom cabinet and is throwing them one-by-one into the toilet.

"Stop doing that!" I tell her, putting her in time-out.

Miraculously, I manage to put clothes and my son is mostly dressed, aside from the one snow boot that he cannot manage to find. We search high and low and eventually discover it underneath the couch.

He's good to go. But my daughter has now run away from time-out and I can't find her anywhere. Finally, I locate her. She's underneath my bed.

"We gotta go! Let's put your coat on."

I put her coat on and we're ready to get out the door.

And that, my friends, is my morning. Every. Single. Day.

This article was originally published at The Huffington Post. Reprinted with permission from the author.