sǝuoſ ǝuıɥsunS | notebook, journal, inter-web log

I’m not an early riser. I am a night owl. I tell you in another life I was most certainly a bat or a cockroach, because I don’t really wake up until the sun goes down, and the morning is something which is best sipped deeply just before bed. I’ve always been this way, and though I have proven to myself that I can be places at 6:30am, and actually walk around in the daylight without turning to stone, or crumbling to dust, I just like the night time better.

My son is a crack of dawn head. Yes, just before the clock strikes seven he’s wide awake, and full of energy, wanting to play, and eat his “lunch” and has a hundred questions. Usually it’s so cute that I wake up with a huge smile on my face, but being a night owl, and a semi-professional mood factory, sometimes I don’t say anything.

This morning neither one of us were feeling all that well. My son has been coughing all night, and we both have runny noses. So I asked that we sleep an extra hour, and snuggle. He tried, really he did. He climbed into bed with me and we did our very best to cuddle and fall back to sleep. But it’s just so hard for a little boy, once he’s wide awake, to go back to sleep. So instead we got as warm as we could and talked things over. He told me all about how he felt about comics when he was three years old as opposed to his far more enlightened and sophisticated point of view now that he’s five and three quarters. When he described himself as being five and three quarters I had to step back a moment. I counted on my fingers the months until May. My son is nearly six years old, and he really likes Spider-Man and the X-men now that he’s five years old. when I think about it, he really liked Spider-Man and the X-men when he was three years old too. I guess time flies when you are having fun.

On that note, the only thing to do was to get up, move the heater into the living room and make breakfast as quickly as possible.

We have a lot on our plate again today. Yesterday, and the two days before that were so full of people to see, places to go, and things to do that I really feel like staying home today and just staying warm inside. Tomorrow Grandmama and Pop Pop are coming to visit, and in the evening we travel to LA to see Doc and Ali and we have quite a schedule down there before he returns to the east coast on Sunday. So considering his sniffles and cough, maybe the best thing we could do would be to stay in, and hang out.

Maybe the strangest thing is that I seem to be doing all right on a few hours of sleep. I am a little moody, but I’m always at least a little moody. Somehow it doesn’t matter how tired I am… I just look at my little boy’s dear face, and I’ve suddenly got a ton of energy, and can’t wait to get up and play Whack-a-mole. Just a few days, the first we have ever spent together like this, is enough to give me a deeper respect for the position his mother has been in for years, and the life altering change beyond feelings and ideas. I can understand things which I think I may have been previously simply expected to get my head around. I didn’t get my head around them. But I’m like that… I don’t really know much of anything unless we talk about it, and I don’t really absorb things unless they come from the heart. Often these things must be repeated in several ways before I’ll understand completely. That must be exhausting for the people around me. I can understand that, but it makes a good case for my inner child’s belief that no one really gives a crap about me because most of the time it seems like people can neither be bothered, and are deaf to my eloquent expression. I am fully prepared to accept that I am the deaf mute in the posse. But that still doesn’t help me understand your point of view, nor does it contribute anything to our mutual understanding.

I suppose my point is that however odd, or unnatural this business of rising early to cut strawberries and make toast, it is a pleasure. This is the way it should be. I have always wanted a more integral role in my son’s well being, and happy, brilliant life. And so moody, sleepy, preoccupied, or sneezing, it doesn’t matter in the least. The joy of fatherhood is simple, and amazing. He wants another bagel, so I’m getting up, pressing publish, and going to make him one. And that… is that.