Like most parents, I wake up every morning to the sound of my children. Now I must admit here that I am one of the lucky ones, our children don't usually start making much noise until about 9 a.m. (yes, feel free to hate me now, because the two little ones also take three hour naps, and everyone is usually in bed by 9 p.m. if not earlier). And some days we sleep in even later, like yesterday when Aunt Kelly woke us up at 10 a.m. when she stopped in for a visit (I know, I know - it was time for us to get up anyway - and we love visitors any time of day!).
What's perhaps a little unusual is the way that our children wake us up. We keep them contained in their rooms for their own safety (and our sanity). We already have four baby gates in the house (one at each of the two staircases up, and one in each of the two open doorways to our downstairs office), so we decided not to put one at the top of the stairs (because in that same hallway there is also a bathroom, a laundry room and another set of open stairs up to the third floor). We would either have to keep all of these rooms locked and add two more baby gates, or we could simply do what we do - essentially lock the kids in their rooms at night. The little guys still have a child safety knob which keeps them in, and Connor has a reversed lock (because he's become smarter than the child safety gear).
You can sometimes hear them simply playing with the toys they keep in their rooms. Connor likes to roll his trains on the window sill and watch traffic drive in front of the house. Alexander and Sawyer will sometimes be heard laughing (who knows at what) or playing with their old car seat toys - two hanging animals that rattle. But you definitely know when they're ready to get up. There are two very distinct noises. For the twins (usually Alexander is the worst), they like to lay in the floor in front of their door and kick it as hard as they possibly can - over and over and over until their lazy parents get out of bed! Connor used this trick for a while too, but now that he's older and wiser, he has a more refined technique. He knocks, softly at first and louder if you aren't as quick about it as he would like. This is my alarm clock, every single day - knock, knock; bang, bang! Good morning to you, too.
