Morning rituals.

First a little about me . . . Showers are my coffee. When I wake up in the morning not much time passes before I head into the shower. I am not a morning coffee or tea drinker, although I do fancy a cup now and then. Instead, I shower.

So, this morning as I was showering (my few minutes of solitude prior to my darlings waking up) I was bolted out of my rainfall abyss by the sound of my oldest declaring a wonderful "Happy Morning Mom". Not wanting her cheery disposition to be halted, I slowly pulled the shower curtain back to say happy morning, in a audio just above a whisper, and calmly asked her to keep her voice down as to not wake up her little sister who was still in dream land. She smiled at me with her beautiful smile and a tilt of the head with an "ok" as she skipped out of the room to go about her morning activities. She came in three more times, it could have been four, to tell me happy morning before I finally gave up on the solitude of a morning shower, got out and dried off.

I was able to get dressed and get back into the bathroom to finish getting ready before she joined me again. This time she entered without saying much. She had brought in her new hair brush that I brought home for her last night. She was very excited about the idea of having her own brush, as was my youngest, and climbed up onto her step stool in front of her sink and began brushing out her long copper colored hair as she watched me get ready.

The process of drying ones hair, when look at from the sidelines, is quite a skeptical really. The fluffling, brushing, flipping, messing up, combing straight . . . it is almost as if the person can't decide what they want their hair today and are trying everything before deciding on one final resting spot for every hair on their head. It was this process that I was going through as my eldest stood upon her step stool brushing out her hair. She would copy me by flipping her hair from one shoulder to the next; This is quite a feat seeing as her hair goes to the middle of her back. When I bent over to get the underside of my hair dry, she stepped down from her step stool, flipped her hair over and began brushing. I continued to act as if I was drying my hair as I watched her. She brushed her hair from every angle as she hung upside down. Once she felt she had gotten out all the snarles, she did test it by running her hand over every section of her hair, she flipped not one time but twice to make sure every piece of hair that had been hanging upside down was now laying where it should down her back.

I too flipped my hair back over, finished drying, added the final touch of a head band and lotion. She had obviously finished up, smiled in the mirror, proclaimed her hair was complete and left the room . . . don't worry, she would return.

As I finished putting my face together for the morning, making sure I was fully awake, she knocked on the bathroom door. A pretend play thing she does when she wants you to open the door and say hello, as if she has just come over to your house to play. So, obliging her pretend world I opened the bathroom door with a cheery (but still very quiet) "why hello, what can I do for you miss?". She then proceeded to show me her beautiful bracelets which were actually the hair bands that I had purchased for her last night to go with her new brush. She probably had about 30 on each arm, as they went all the way to her elbows, in multiple colors of course.