5:30 is magical

Well, as magical as that particular ungodly hour of the morning can possibly be.

I know this will probably jinx it but waking up the household at 5:30am worked shockingly well.

For frame of reference please note that our mornings had been starting at 6:00am and most often included, crying, yelling, dog poo, misplaced urine, physically placing half dressed children in the car and in one instance one of my sons bringing a pound of plain spaghetti noodles for lunch.

So we made a pact to get up earlier. Of course I forgot to reset the boys alarms and they have no clue that an alarm needs to be set so I had to make the rounds and wake everyone up.

My alarm went off at 5am and I ignored it til 5:30 and then remembered the whole wake up earlier plan, leapt out of bed, fell over a box and then went to wake up the household.

I woke up Moe who cried, ignored me and curled up in a very naked ball in the corner (i'm sure I sent him to bed in pajamas). Went downstairs and woke up Larry who screamed in terror ( I swear I just popped my head in the room with a cheery, "time to get up") and discovered that the puppy who had been unattended for approx 3 minutes the night before had managed to poo on Larrys floor during that 3 minutes. The sad part of this was that Larry must have noticed and just gone to bed leaving it on the floor for me to find in the morning. Finally I popped in on Curly and did my best to refrain from pointing and laughing at him as he lay sleeping in his satin sleep mask on his satin blanket in his satin robe. (to be fair I only purchased the blanket. The robe was from a halloween costume and the mask was found laying around our house and given to him to stop bad dreams etc...)

Next up was teaching Curly how to let the puppy out of his kennel so that he wouldnt pee all over the house. My dear son was baffled and insistent that he always opened the door to outside first and didnt understand why it was happening (he took over the job three pee filled days ago.) So I watched him open the door, stand in front of the door to open the kennel and completely block the dog from going outside. I yanked him out of the way, got the dog outside and then held a brief kennel opening class until we were on the same page for how it should be done.

It was now 5:40am and I had criers, screamers, whiners, poop and pee. Devastated I stomped back upstairs to get myself ready and let whatever was bound to happen, happen. By 6am I was ready to go and sat down to a leisurely breakfast and time to check my email and facebook. At 6:20am Larry came inside from waiting in the car(I thought he was feeding the cat) wanting to know if we were ever planning to leave? Turns out he had gotten himself ready in record time. At this point Moe ambled up the stairs in his boxers mumbling about getting distracted and how he knew he was almost out of time.

At 6:30am all three were ready, wearing shoes and even had brushed teeth and hair, and by 6:40am we left for school. I'm not sure we can expect this level of awesomeness everyday but oh dear Lord I thank you for the fact that there was no yelling and very minimal poo, urine, crying and zero half dressed children or bizarre  lunch choices. All that from 30 extra minutes in the morning. Don't worry, I'll keep you posted on whether we maintain the magic or if I have children falling asleep in their soup. Do you have a magic morning routine tip for me?