“Meesaiko, when you wake us up tomorrow, you have to say, ‘Rise and shine, get up!’ …”

The command sounds simple enough, rise and shine. As I dig out clothes for tomorrow morning, I consider saying it in the morning to humor my tiny stepdaughter.

Emma is climbing into bed, plopping down, pulling her covers up to her chest and delicately smoothing the blanket. Jenna is still sitting in the middle of bedroom floor, putting her underwear on and fumbling with a fleece nightgown.

“Emma, you can be Rise and I can be Shine, okay?” Jenna says, matter-of-factly. Then she mimicks the way she thinks I’ll say it, ‘Wake up, Rise and Shine!’, and giggles.

And I giggle too because, dude, how damn cute can you be?

+++

It’s Sunday morning and Darin and I are picking the children up from an overnight at my parents’ house. They have been swimming, using swimsuits that stay at their grandparents’ house so we don’t have to bring them over every time we come. Jenna is wearing a t-shirt.

“Mommy! You fah-gotta bwing my bay-ding suit!” she yells at me, as if I had any idea they were spending the night when we dropped them off 15 hours before (I didn’t). “I swimmed in my shirt!”

Since her birth she has embodied all that is meant by an exclamation point. She is fully of energy! She is bossy and commands your attention! And her eyes grow big with excitement at almost every sentence! Sometimes, when she is upset or embarrassed, she is more like a semicolon and that ray of energy is broken or diverted, but the exclamation point always returns. This day, she is two exclamation points.

Jenna and the others have gone inside to change their clothes; Jenna, however, has been swimming in her ‘pennies’ and they are wet.

“You didn’t bwing me no dwy pennies!”

Wow, excuse me. I didn’t know you would end up swimming in your underoos. My apologies.

My mom takes Jenna’s wet undies and heads towards the laundry room, they need a quick run through the dryer. Ever the boss, Jenna follows her and tells her what to do.

“Gwammy! Put dem in the dwyer, NOT IN THE WETTER!”

The wetter. You know, the opposite of the dryer.

+++

Though he has been in her life since birth, Emma has never fully warmed up to her Uncle Isaac. And it’s become a running joke in the family.

“Emma, give Isaac a hug,” we’ll say. And she run away and hide. Almost every single time.

Jenna, on the other hand, LOVES Isaac. They’re like night and day, those two. (Bada-bing! Thank you, I’ll be here all week!)

Since Dara and Isaac have moved, Emma has decided to thaw the ice princess routine. Dara even has photographic proof that Emma sat next to Isaac one day.

Tonight we all went to watch Darin’s softball game and I tried to prepare Emma beforehand.

“Is Isaac your BFF, Emma? Say yes!” Look at me, forging everlasting friendships. Ha.

“Okay! I’ll say it.”

So fast-forward about an hour. Isaac and Dara show up and I remember our little joke.

“Emma, who’s your best friend?” I asked with a laugh.

She turns around to look for Isaac, then hides when they make eye contact. This is not going as planned.

“Emma, who’s your BFF?”

She peeks out, points at Isaac and says, “THAT GUY!”

+++

We have a free summer membership to the Pink Palace Museum in Memphis, so Sunday we took our first trip. There were a lot of neat exhibits and the kids really enjoyed it. They asked a lot of questions and at one exhibit, Jaylen asked about this funny metal contraption.

“That’s a cowbell,” I say.

Yeah, you know where I’m going with this, right?

A few seconds go by, then I say it, even though I know they won’t get it. It pretty much just stumbled out of my mouth. I couldn’t help it.

“Do you have a fever, Jaylen?”

Puzzled, he looks at me and shakes his head. I continue looking at different items and notice Darin has now joined us. He’s feeling Jaylen’s forehead, but I thought he was just aggravating him.

“Echo, he feels fine,” Darin says. “He doesn’t have a fever. Why’d you ask that?”

Seriously?

“I’ve got a fever … MORE COWBELL! Get it?”

“You are so not funny.”

He always says that, but he always laughs when he does. So I don’t believe him.

+++

We’re sitting at the dinner table, talking and chewing as we usually do. I’m staring at Jenna, trying to determine what’s different about her hair before I realize it was the other four-year-old with self-imposed layers.

“DID YOU CUT YOUR HAIR, JENNA GRACE?!”

I know she saw the fire in my eyes. The cut wasn’t so bad, I’ve seen much worse, but she needed to know it was not okay.

She nodded her head in honesty, letting me know she did, in fact, cut her own hair. And with her brother’s scissors. I’ve already been through this twice with Jaiden (well, three if you count the fact that she cut Jaylen’s hair too) and once with Emma, this is pretty much old news and, besides, it looks like long layers. Not bad at all.

“WHY did you cut your hair, Jenna?” I expected an ‘I don’t know’ but Jenna … well, Jenna’s gonna give it to you straight.

“I wanted to look like Jaiden!”

Well okay then.

+++

“Mom, can you like, set your alarm for 5 o’clock and we get up, get dressed and leave by 6 o’clock?”

This girl cannot be serious, I think. Jaiden is like her father (and her stepfather, for that matter) and loves to sleep. If no one bothered her, she’d sleep half the day away.

“What? No way! Why would you want to get up that early?”

We usually get up between 6:40-6:50 a.m. each morning, then hurriedly begin our day. It’s just how we roll.

“I want to beat Landon to Ms. G–’s house tomorrow. He gets there at 6:30 and he’s always the first one!”

She must be trippin’ if she thinks I’m getting up that early so that they can beat another kid to school. It’s summer break, for Heaven’s sake!

+++

“Stick with me and I’ll teach ya baseball,” my husband tells me before bed tonight, just after he’d spent 10 minutes explaining a play to me. A hidden ball trick, perhaps?

Good luck with that.

I’m the girl who asks about the lines on the football field (What are they, lasers? Can the players see them?) every single season. I really think he’s wasting his time.

Related posts:

1. The Worst Hair Brusher. And other fine tales. With two four-year-olds in the house, there is never a...
2. Still I Rise I don’t typically follow the NaBloPoMo writing prompts, but I...
3. There is no greater love … You’re the sweetest thing I have ever known And to...