Rude Awakening
Lately, every morning I wake up to someone screaming at me. No, I don’t have a sadistic husband, but rather my toddler son has taken to screaming urgently as though his life was on the line every morning. He goes from snoozing peacefully to shouting “MOMMY! MOOOOOMMMMMMMMYY!” in the blink of an eye. It’s not a pleasant way to wake up, believe me. It’s hard to realize when I’m first jolted awake that this is just the way he’s waking up now as opposed to there being actual trouble.
The worst thing about this (other than the sheer fright of it) is that he works himself up so much that he can’t fall back asleep. That means if he wakes up screaming at five in the morning, that’s the time we get up. Sometimes I’m lucky and the dramatic screaming doesn’t start up until after six. To tell you the truth, I would rather wake up naturally around five than have to wake up to screaming an hour later. Did I mention it’s not a pleasant way to wake up?
My husband and I were talking about it this morning and after some reflection we realized that our daughter went through this exact same phase. She too would wake up screaming as though something was urgently wrong, and oddly enough it was the same “Mommy! Mommy!” deal. I won’t even go into how unfair it is that nobody ever wakes up screaming “Daddy! Daddy!” but at least now I know that this is probably just a phase that he’ll outgrow, just like my daughter did. Until then I’ll just keep waking up every morning momentarily convinced that something horrible is going on…until I come to my senses and remember that my son is just in the middle of a really annoying phase.
