Morning People

My boy likes to sleep late. Like a teenager he sleeps. This is the way it's always been, just part of our family rhythm. Since he was a babe I have been at home with him, yet working when I had the chance. I managed 40 hour weeks when I needed to... just grabbing the free time during naps in the early days, plus after bed time for a few hours on week days, then adding in a weekend day if I needed to when my husband was home to wrangle the boy. We've always had a family bed, and he wouldn't stir until I stirred. And since I was up late and sleeping late, he got in to the habit of sleeping late too. The boy has never witnessed dawn.

Until yesterday.

He really wanted to see the Orionid meteor shower. And peak viewing was supposed to be about 5:30am. I explained to my boy, my sweet boy who has a very weak grasp on numbers and zero grasp on time, what it means to set an alarm and wake up at that hour. And he was still game. So we did. He jumped up joyfully at the sound of my cell phone alarm (we don't keep clocks, an old trick from the baby days) and was ready to go. We pulled on our fleece and dragged our quilt on deck and pointed our eyes towards Orion (which he can always find faster than me) and waited.

Not a word was exchanged. And not a meteor was sighted. After what seemed like quite a long time of sky watching, as the dawn light began to transform the world around us, my boy broke the silence.

"I think this would be a good time to go fishing," he declared. Somehow he knew in his bones, that the only reason to rise this early was to catch fish.

But neither of us was willing to emerge from the womb of the quilt. So we chatted about what we heard. He talked about the reflections on the water and how they distorted images. We heard a flock of geese in the distance and then watched them emerge in a V, heading south. He marveled that there was a world buzzing around us before the sun was even fully up.
So... this is that thing they call morning.


"It's time for coco now," he declared. And into the warm embrace of the boat we scurried.

That morning was not one for meteor sighting in our slice of the sky. But now my boy knows what morning is. Morning is for coco. Morning is for cuddles in a favorite quilt. Morning is for fishing. Morning is for morning people.