‘Mom, Can We Play the Wii?”

I am, by nature, an early morning person so when dawn cracks over the horizon, while the kids are still sleeping, I get up and drink a cup of decaf and do my most important work of the day: check three different e-mail accounts, two different blogs, two different chat boards, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, TMZ.com, PerezHilton.com, MSNBC.com and generally wallow in my small time frame of early morning aloneness before my kids wake up and I have deal with their incessant demands for breakfast and something fun to do with their summer day. Yes, early mornings this time of year are the best.
In addition to being an early riser, I am also a planner. So this summer I planned ahead and put my kids in full-day summer camp three days a week. Let me say now for the record, best idea I’ve had in years.
Never mind I have three whole summer days all to myself, camp doesn’t start until 9 a.m., which means I can drag my feet for hours before I have to even think about whether their camp t-shirts are clean. Furthermore, I discovered the “speed” settings on my washer/dryer so their pizza-stained shirts clean up in a jiffy, all while I effortlessly pour cereal into a bowl so they can eat breakfast while I re-check e-mail and Facebook again. Dressed and fed and out the door for camp in 40 minutes flat, now that’s a summer morning.
One nasty little habit my kids have developed this year is waking up and wanting to jump on the Wii first thing. Their eyes are barely open, they are still laying in bed with their pajamas on and I hear this scratchy, barely coherent little voice from upstairs, “Mom, can I play the Wii?” Electronics are the first thing they think about in the morning. Where do they get these habits?
“The Wii,” I tell them, “is not going to brush your teeth, get you dressed and fed and out the door for camp!” Then there’s all kinds of moaning and groaning and complaining and bargaining and stomping and suddenly they don’t want to go to camp no matter what is on the schedule because what they really, truly need is to reach the next level in MarioKart.
There are the occasional mornings where I sleep in late, like after a recent party with good friends where the theme was Mexican, we ate the most delicious pork soft tacos ever and I may have had a margarita, or two. The next day my kids woke me up.
“Mom, can we play the Wii?”
“I’m dreaming about Robert Pattinson, leave me alone!” I howled at them in protest, but my kids are heartless. “We want breakfast!” they demanded. Geez, can’t a middle-aged mom catch a break?
Hey, speaking of Robert Pattinson, has anyone seen that standing life-sized poster of Edward Cullen from Twilight in the Cape May Court House library? I think it would look perfect on the other side of my bed, greeting me when I woke up each day. “Good morning, Edward!” I would say and give his dry, stiff cardboard face a kiss and pretend he’s going to lean over and give me one of those bad boy vampire bites.
But I digress.
Sometimes my summer mornings start so early I get up, get things done and go back to sleep again. ‘Get things done,’ is, of course, relative. That might mean hanging out on the Disney Cruise chat forum fantasizing about my next vacation. Problem is, just imagining a luxurious summer cruise on an ocean liner in the middle of the Caribbean makes me queasy.
I go back to bed and repeat to myself ‘I will not get seasick, I will not get seasick, I will not get seasick’ before drifting off to sleep again and dreaming about Edward Cullen and I together on a boat in the middle of the clear, blue ocean. I am on the bow of the ship, the wind is blowing gently through my color-treated grey hair, my head is tilted back so my neck is subtly exposed, Edward’s razor sharp canines are moving slowly toward my carotid artery, his ice cold skin is sparkling and shimmering in the sun…
“Mom, can we play the Wii?”
Kluger writes from Dennsville