Most mornings I wake up and Noah has a hand or a knee on top of me and Shortie has shoved one hand under me and the other is clinging to me so hard I can barely roll over. This is a bit of a quandary as I am both an incredibly active sleeper and I need to wake up to use the toilet long before them. Getting out of the bed is a very delicate procedure.

I love this feeling. My middle child really doesn’t like to get out of bed unless I come and kiss them awake. They will lie in bed and tell me that their alarm was the gate to waking up but they can’t open it until they get a kiss from me because the kiss is the key.

We are noticing that we can’t get all of our stuff done if we try to do it after 9am breakfast. It’s just not working. So today we are getting up earlier. I have been waking up between 6:45 and and 7:15 for the past few weeks so I said let’s do 7:30. I set an alarm to make sure I can come kiss them awake. What time did I wake up? FUCKING 4:15!! My body is a shit. But it means I spent time medicating and talking to myself. I will be in a much better frame of mind for patiently guiding along my not so little partner. This kid is coming for me in size.

We are working on increasing fitness together. We are not buying a car. We have to be able to easily and casually get around this city and it will always be difficult if we aren’t more fit than we are. We have been consistent about doing it for a bit and I think it will continue until the trip in February quite easily. I need to find a way to have it extend past then because they have to be able to easily get back and forth to town a few times a day. That should be no big deal. It’s not even a full 15 minutes if I ride fairly casually. Just biking is not getting me to where I want to be in my body. I have to run.

And so does my kid. I’m going to make a rule though: we can’t process intense family matters. This is practice for compartmentalisation. You have to be able to talk about things sometimes and not at other times. It is part of how you live in the world. It is part of how you build relationships over time with gradual increases in intimacy. If you walk around sharing every negative thought loudly with every person who walks past they don’t want to help you or be your friend they want to move away from you. That is a simple reality. You have to learn how to choose when and how you share different parts of what you are thinking. We all do. Learning that has been really hard.

This not so little one still needs a lot of support and it has to be separate from everyone else. Alright then. I don’t care that you really want to stay up late and sleep late. I can’t do that. I will be a nasty fucking cunt. I can’t. So. Hey baby. Here is your key to larkdom. Three minutes and counting till the countdown to the need for the key. I better hit post.