Morning Time

James is up.

It's 6:30 in the morning, and I can hear him chatting away up in his bed.

These are the few hours that I'm supposed to get to myself before the day starts in earnest. My alarm went off at 5:30, and I found my running jacket over on J's side of the bed, then the laptop on my own, before I made my way down the creaky stairs.

I hope it wasn't the stairs that woke him up. Owen, at this point, will never have known anything in his life besides loud creaky stairs and floors. I've been working for the past three months on the art of stepping with the arch of my foot on the very outside eastern side of each step, where there is the least creak. Except for the second stair from the top. That one just sags and groans no matter where you step on it. I try to just avoid that step altogether, but it's hard to do when you're carrying an armload of child or guerdon, as I was this morning.

You notice, by the way, if you live with a creaky staircase, when other people have silent, well-maintained wooden staircases. When we were at J's parents house for Christmas break there wasn't a single time that I went down their front staircase without a habitual tentative first step becoming a delighted heavy bound down the rest of the well-joined stairs.

Once I make it down the stairs, I turn the thermostat up. I listened this morning to make sure that everyone was still asleep, plugged my headphones into my phone, found the morning news podcast, pulled my hat over my head, and stepped outside.

The first 90 seconds is always the worst. The initial step out the front door is like getting slapped in the face, but once I get moving I warm up pretty quickly. I ran down two blocks this morning to Culver Parkway before turning West towards Culver Road. It isn't the best plowed stretch to run, but it is the best lit, and I don't trust anyone out driving at 5:30 in the morning to see me particularly well. The snow was particularly nice this morning, doing the shimmery diamond reflection everywhere I looked, although all the wet slush from yesterday had refrozen and was particularly slippery.

Half an hour later, I'm back in the house and making coffee. I don't think it was the coffee grinder that woke James up. It sounds terribly loud in the kitchen, but it used to be a lot closer to his room at our old apartment and it never disturbed him then.

As my coffee brews I dig out Henle's Latin Composition, or a similar Greek or Hebrew text depending on the day. For 20 minutes this morning I practiced putting tenses in the right order. We do not know what he is doing. Non scimus quid agat. Et cetera. By now the coffee is on and I can either read Homer and Ovid and a bit of the Bible for 45 minutes or I can try to write a blog. But this morning, James is up.

I probably should go practice in the basement before I try to read. My reasons for practicing last are twofold. First, I like to have my coffee at my desk. It's cold in the basement, and the coffee cools off too fast to enjoy when I'm down there. Second, I know that enough sound bleeds upstairs (even with the practice mute) that one of the boys is likely to hear it before I finish. Most mornings when I try to do my morning practicing in the basement I end up holding Owen before I wanted to be done.

These couple of hours that I have in the morning before they get up...it's a vital, sacred time. I'm always a little sad to give up the solitude and the stillness of the empty downstairs. But once I make my way up to James' bedroom he'll be so happy to get up and start "playin' marbles wiv Daddy" that I'll forget all about how I wanted to practice this or read that right away.

Of course, now he's fallen back asleep.

But I'm excited for him to get up.