As I start writing this, it’s 6:28 a.m. — still two minutes until Benjamin normally gets out of bed, 32 minutes until Sam usually comes down for breakfast and 47 minutes until Mason normally rousts himself from slumber.
Not so this morning…. They’ve invaded my productivity window.
While at the home office this week, I’ve been getting up at 5, trying to get a jump on the day. The construction crew working on our addition and home renovations arrives at 7, and between that and the usual morning chaos that results from the pre-school rituals of three boys, it had been translating to me not sitting down at my desk until 9 or 9:30, which is later than I normally like. So getting a couple of hours head-start has been the right psychological remedy for me this week.
Benjamin, though, was up-and-at-’em at 5:32. I fetched him his orange juice, and asked him to go back upstairs. “It’s too early, Ben,” I said, ignoring for the moment that I wasn’t exactly setting a good example for crawling back into bed and getting a few more minutes of shut-eye.
“No, that’s OK,” he said. “I’ll wait here for my brothers.” He then sat on the kitchen floor to drink his juice.
That would have been fine, except the attention span of a boy turning 4 in two weeks being what it is, he ran into the office two minutes later, hit his shoulder on my chair, and started crying from the pain. Or maybe it was the lack of my attention. Or both.
Sufficiently comforted, he climbed up onto the bench next to me, and a minute later said he was chilly, asking me to get him a blanket.
After wrapping him in the blanket — twice, because the first time I didn’t get it over his feet — he propped his feet up on my chair, and said, “OK, you can work now.”
OK, boss. Thanks.
I decided to try to gain the upper hand, and fired up Netflix to play Thomas the Tank Engine via the “Watch Instantly” functionality. I figured I could stick a window with the movie in it in the corner of my monitor and Ben could be entertained while I could be productive.
What you can’t see in this screenshot is Thomas is paused 5 minutes into the show. Mason woke up at 5:57, and Benjamin became his shadow instead, but not without both asking for my help with the television upstairs. While I was up there, Sam got up too.
It was time to surrender and stop working.
It’s likely time to stop getting up at 5 too. Clearly, the universe is trying to tell me something.
