I'm an early riser, my husband, not so much. All of our married life, I have been the one to get everyone up and ready in the mornings. Lunch packing and permission slip signing was always my duty. Getting three kids up, moving, and out of the door to be dropped off at three different places hasn't always gone smoothly to say the least.
A few years ago, I would say I started every day irritated. Irritated that every task of getting the girls ready each morning was all MY responsibility. Why should he get to sleep in, while I do all of the work?! His morning routine takes about 17 minutes while mine is 2 hours!
And then one day it hit me. I was looking at taking care of my girls as a job, not the privilege that it was.
Perspective has two sides: positive or negative. The moment I realized I was looking at my mornings the total wrong way, a shift in my mood began. These tasks were no longer burdens but rather blessings. I went from an "I have to" attitude, to "I get to". Not everyone gets to. Someone else is dreaming of everything I was taking for granted.
Albert Einstein once said, "there are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."
We have a choice to decide how we view our lives and what is going on in them. Even the smallest of blessings can bring more gratitude if we let it. Now every morning when I snuggle my four-year-old while she slowly wakes up, or one of my girls toots like a very large man and we belly laugh for ten minutes, or we jam out to princess songs in the car, or one of them tells me something really really important and we are holding up the drop-off lane so she can finish her thought, I realize just how special these little moments are. I would miss these moments every day if I didn't get them ready in the mornings. I wouldn't trade my little miracle morning moments for any amount of extra sleep. Or anything at all for that matter.
