Apparently They Do Listen to Me

This was a morning that made me feel like I've been doing something right as a parent.

Maybe not everything, but something.

I was up all night with Ellie when she was sick, and I didn't really get any sleep during the day yesterday, because she was holding me to a very strict schedule: a teeny-tiny spoonful of frozen Pedialyte ("juice slushies") and ice chips every 15 minutes.  That's what the advice nurse said to do, and since I wouldn't let her have anything else, those incremental treats were incredibly important to her.  At the most, I had maybe five 5-minute catnaps all day long.

25 (broken) minutes of sleep in a 36-hour time period does not a happy mommy make.

I collapsed into bed at 9:00 last night.  It would have been sooner, but Chris had an unavoidable church meeting, so I still had to get the kids in bed and the house in a state I didn't mind waking up to before I could crash.

This morning right before Chris left for work he mentioned that it looked like it hadn't warmed up quite as predicted.  Apparently he knew this because the tree in front of our house was awfully shiny.  Also, the car was covered in ice.  I asked (it might have been more of a command, really) him to bring me my phone, and there was a text message saying school was canceled, so I just rolled over and went right back to sleep.  This was at about 6:30am.

I vaguely remember hearing the girls' alarms go off at 7:00, but since I knew there wasn't any school, I didn't worry about getting up to force them to help them get moving.

At 8:00 Vicki knocked on the door, fully dressed, and told me she and Lexi just wanted to let me know that they had gotten themselves breakfast and were all ready for school and just waiting for their ride to come pick them up.

And I dissolved into a puddle of mushy happy mommy right there on the bed.

We're always talking to them about responsibility and self-reliance, but they don't often have the opportunity to demonstrate those skills in such a major way.

They were a little bummed when they found out that they didn't actually have school today.  Well, okay, Vicki was bummed.  She said, "You mean I got all dressed and ready for nothing?"  Lexi just said, "Woohoo!" followed quickly by, "Can I play the Wii?"

The rest of our morning hasn't been quite so perfect and parentally blissful (at least one child may have been banned from the Wii for the rest of the day, and someone might have been sent to their room at one point to gain control of their emotions), but at least I know that my kids really do listen (at least sometimes) and take what we teach them to heart.

Knowing that, I can handle all the rest.