Early Morning Musings

My girls and I are very used to being alone.  Just the three of us.  A little person-cat family with habits all our own.  Not really all that different than a person-child family.

Every morning, sometime between 4:00am and 6:00am, Charlie (the baby) wakes up, crawls up to my chest, looks lovingly into my face and lets out this truly pitiful, questioning “MEOW” that I have come to realize means “Mommy, is it time to get up and play yet?”  Typically, I pat her head until she snuggles into the crook of my arm and we drift off to sleep again.  At least until she wakes up a few minutes later and repeats her morning ritual.

Lady Bug (the older sister) will sleep as long as I sleep.  She harrumphs her way onto the bed every night, sprawls in the small space between my left side and the edge of the mattress, and falls asleep with her head rested on her paws.  Most mornings, I wake up to her squished between me and the edge of the mattress, sprawled to get the best angle of the fan, with her head on her paws – in absolutely the same position as the night before.  She meows a little meow at me and snuggles in until I’m ready to get up.  Lady knows that when I am ready to get up, the world will start moving very quickly around her and she relishes quiet moments like this.

Today, Lady Bug got up a bit before me.  When she realized she was up a little early, she climbed back on the bed and laid her head on my leg, waiting patiently until I got up and turned the bathroom faucet on for her morning drink of cool running water.  Charlie ran circles on the mattress, twisting and turning, rolling around to rub her head on the cool sheets, meowing and whining as if it was the greatest injustice that I was not yet ready to get up and play.

To be greeted by my babies every morning is a wonderful thing.  Every single day, I wake up knowing that where ever I am, I am home.  I may not have a husband or children, but I do have my own little family.  In the next four days, we will switch apartments again – this will be the fourth apartment Lady has lived in during her three short years of life – and then pack up the car to drive north to Wisconsin to see the family and celebrate my little sister’s wedding.  The girls will be with me for every step of the way, calming my stress and allowing me to calm theirs.  We will experience virtually the same morning ritual that we always do, only we will be in my parents’ basement instead of our own bed.  We will wake up every morning and have a bit of quiet time before the rest of the world intervenes.  It’s moments like these that I live for, that keep me grounded when the world seems a little too crazy for comfort.