Nothing Like Making Them Hate You
Well, it didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. LOL! But I remember when I was a kid, how I hated being awakened in the morning.
I went in at the normal time this morning and did the normal, “Time to wake up! Get up, get dressed, and make your bed!” Five minutes later, I went in and they were still under the covers. I sang “Reveille” at the top of my lungs, shook the mattress and pulled their covers off of them. Repeated the morning “greeting.” After my shower, they were still in bed, so I went and got my Sousa Marches CD and popped it in their player. Groans of “no, put in Harry Potter.” But no one got up.
After I took my meds and drank some water, brushed my hair and laid out my clothes for the day, I peeked in. No one was up.
So I walked back to the laundry room and got the spray bottle that I use to spritz the clothes while ironing. I marched into their bedroom and spritzed them both. My ten-year-old shouted, “HEY!” and sat straight up in bed with a furious expression on his face. My eight-year-old burst into tears. I said, “Feet on the floor, NOW!”
The ten-year-old scrambled for the ladder off the top bunk, and the eight-year-old hopped out of the bottom bunk. I hugged them both (especially the eight-year-old) and told them that I couldn’t let them keep lying around in bed, when (a) I’d told them to get up and (b) we needed to leave in 15 minutes, and it was too cold for them to go half-dressed and barefoot.
I explained that if they were not willing to follow instructions, they would have to pay the consequences, and that meant that I would do whatever it took to roust them out of bed in the morning. I also told them that from now on, whenever they didn’t get up at first call, not only would I spritz them with water or dump frozen marbles in their beds to get them up, but I would make them take a nap in the afternoon and go to bed a half-hour earlier at night.
It will be interesting to see if they get up at first call tomorrow.