There is a Grand Canyon width divide between how it feels to get up on a cool North Carolina morning, pad quietly down to the kitchen to make some coffee and take my vitamins with half a coffee cup of orange juice, then go back upstairs to write this blog while everyone sleeps and dreams the dreams of angels….and getting up really early because Nate is climbing into the bed and Sparrow needs to eat some prunes so that she can….well, whatever she hasn’t done in three days and needs to do because her stomach is bothering her….and Jenny can’t sleep because of all the commotion….and….

There is a difference.

It is a subtle difference….I can feel it in the air, somehow….but I know that it’s there.

I would miss the heck out of it if it wasn’t here to get under my skin.

All of these things that feel as if we won’t survive them now…..I would miss them.

There sure is a difference in how the morning feels with the cartoons cranked up in a formerly quiet house…and activity hitting the fan at 5:00 in the morning… instead of a solitary quiet Norwegian slapping plastic keys and sipping his coffee.

Maybe it’s a question of access.

Nate came into our room sometime early this morning….and I heard Jenny ask…surprised at 4:45…”Where did you come from?” when she discovered him in the bed that was already crowded with 3 people in it.

You have to be fast on your feet when you’re trying to sleep, sometimes.

If we locked the door, he’d just be banging on it at 4:45 instead of us having the chance to discover him crowded in next to us.

It’s probably a potentially less jarring conclusion to just let him quietly insinuate himself between us than to have him pounding on anything that early.

I can’t lock any of these guys out.

That won’t work.

And I sure can’t drug them.

That’s illegal and morally reprehensible.

So…I guess we’ll just have to live with the surprises that come with having another batch of really little children late in life.

“Late in life”…..I’m considering this really early middle age.

It’s not late in life….not even close.

No matter how tired I get….I’ve still got a healthy dose of mojo going on.

We’re going to make it, man!! The other option is too unappealing to go in that direction.

So I make the “jump”….I work at remembering how all these gifts play out in real time….that a little bit of roughness doesn’t mean that the whole road is hard to travel…that there’ll be “time enough for counting…when the dealin’s done…” (in the immortal….immortal?….words of Kenny Loggins Rankin Rogers.

We don’t pass through more than once.

To the best of my limited understanding and knowledge, that’s something I’ve come to believe.

It’s a one go round ferris wheel….er, merry-go-round.

So let these early mornings come…we’ll just make some coffee and ruminate on what it feels like to get a good night’s sleep….and when the good night comes, we’ll appreciate it all the more for the early,early mornings we remember.

I remember sleep…..still.

“The Gambler” Kenny Loggins Rankin Rogers!