Elusive Solitude

It is 7:10 in the morning, the sun's first rays are crafting themselves behind the trees. As I look out my kitchen window, I see dark tree shadows against a multi-hued sunrise. This is the quietest my house ever is, and even then there is always noise. The refrigerator is humming, and at any random minute the icemaker will drop frozen cubes into its bin with a groan, creak and a crash, then water to refill and repeat. The HVAC unit just stopped. I hear cargo ships a couple miles away on the river. The water heater is doing something. And my husband is snoring. I've joked he snores to the point that the ceiling over our bed is concaved, risking collapse. I've just returned from the high school bus run to take my junior and senior to be collected by some guy they all call Freelove. They hate the bus, because the other kids on it are, to be polite - obnoxious. But it's a given in life that we all have things we disdain and deal with anyway. My Clone is asleep when she should be awake, because she stayed up way too late last night watching tv with Devildog. Blur is, very thankfully, still asleep so Devildog gets to keep snoring a little while longer. And here I sit, when I should be moving about to get the day going. The coffee in my FSU Tervis Tumbler, the appliances going about their business, and the sky behind the trees changing from the pretty colors of sunrise to the ones seen the rest of the day. I have knitting I want to be doing, but that means I'd have to turn on a light and risk waking Blur who sleeps on the couch most nights because we're overly permissive and let this ginger midget run the show more than she should. But like her sister who at that age also slept on the couch and with us for way too long, at least she is asleep. With a toddler, just like during that time affectionately called "baby jail", if that child sleeps ANY where at all, so that parents can sleep, then that child can sleep where ever they cease to fidget. Because when you have children, solitude is ever sought after on a regular basis. When you have 4 who run the gamut of ages and stages, you make a point to seek out any ounce of solace you can when ever you can. And then you get off the computer to go wake that 4th grader who is going to be even crankier the 3rd & 4th time you go in there to wake her because it's now 7:30 and she needs to be ready to walk out the door in 1/10th of the minutes she usually has because she wakes up by 7:00. And you pray her complaints don't wake the toddler, ever thankful she's on the couch so she doesn't pick up her head with that grunt that makes mommy want to curse because you just *know* you better bolster the coffee pot for Devildog because she's not going to go back to sleep.
Ah, there's the icemaker now. And looking around, I better put away the yarn because I know someone will want to "koh-shay" because mommy does too.