Acceptable Reasons to Wake Me Up

I wrote this list in my mind at 3am last night, the third night in a row that I woke in the 3-4am window to the angelic sound of my name being sung from the bedroom of a toddler just down the hall.

Maaaaaaa-maaaaaaaaa! 


To be clear, this is not crying or fear based. This is more of a casual call for reasons that do not make it on to today's list. Their reasons are things like:

* I want you to rub my tummy.
* I want to tell you that I am going to wake up at 7:05am. (Yes, that's Little Man.)
* My blankets fell off my bed.
* My door is closed just a little bit more than I want it to be.

By the way, I think we have the only children in the world who do not sneak into our bedroom and get right in our faces to wake us up. Shocking, but I say preferable because at least it doesn't require me to get out of bed. Instead, our children are lazy and stay in their beds while also waking us up, requiring one of us to get out of bed and then they have the audacity to fall back to sleep right away while I end up tossing and turning for the next hour and a half thinking about blog posts or finishing my book that is now overdue at the library.

Anyway, I hereby name the following reasons for waking me up in the middle of the night as ACCEPTABLE!

* You just peed in your bed. (Or the other, but since Little Man is still in a night diaper, that isn't so much a problem... yet.)
* You fell out of your bed and hurt yourself.
* Some kind of intruder is in your room. This could be an alien, a stranger or our dog. Stuffed animals do not count.
* You puked, or think you might puke in the near future.
* Something has crashed through your bedroom window, spraying glass around the room and waking you up.
* There are people shouting outside your window because a pipe in the street exploded right outside our house and is flooding our yard.
* House is on fire/Smoke alarm is going off.

I can't think of much else. To prove I'm not a mean mommy, I will add the following to the list:

* You had a bad dream.
* You are too cold or too hot because your parents let you choose jammies that are not weather appropriate. (That happens more often than it should.)

Unfortunately, this list is actually pretty pointless because my kids can't read very well yet. And, frankly, they do whatever they want most of the time and probably wouldn't listen even if I told them these new "rules".