Kristen Anne Glover

Five in Tow

The 10 AM Rule

“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” Benjamin Franklin once said, but I should have known better than to take advice from the guy who messes up my kids’ schedules twice a year with Daylight Saving Time.  Clearly, this Founding Father never had to get up in the middle of the night to feed a baby or he would know that rising early just makes a person emotionally unstable.

Still, there’s something noble and industrious about getting up and out the door at the crack of dawn.  It feels very adult, very grown-up.  The responsible me used to drag myself out of bed at 5:45 am, bleary-eyed and comatose, in order to get myself and the kids ready for the day.  We were out the door by 7:15 where we joined the rush of the chronically cranky.  It was a parenting nightmare.

Then I discovered the single greatest child-rearing tip of all time: The 10 AM Rule.  It is brilliantly simple.  If you want to be a good parent, nay, a good human being, don’t leave the house before 10 am.  Ever.  No really—just don’t do it.  Personally, I haven’t left the house before 10 am in years, except for really good Black Friday sales and once, childbirth.  Okay, there’s church too, but that hardly counts because they serve doughnuts.

It’s like being a vampire, only in reverse.  Things go better for me if I stay behind closed doors until the morning is safely underway.  10 am is the safety zone. If I try to leave the house any earlier than that, you might see my fangs.

Think about it: 7:00 am is disastrous.  Children are genetically programed to move slower at this absurd time of the day, unless it’s Christmas or Saturday.  Your child will die if he has to get out from under the covers before 7.  He will die if he has to walk across the floor and put on his own shoes.  He will die if his sister looks as him funny.  He will die if he has to eat breakfast, and he will die if he doesn’t.

At 7 am, “right now” is nearly 50% of your word content.  As in, “Get dressed right now!”  “Eat your breakfast right now!”   “Stop dawdling right now!”  Your child is 10 times more likely to look at you with a face that says, “Make me,” and you are 100% more likely to do exactly that.

It’s hard to be holy at 7 am.

But 8 am is different, and you think, “Any reasonable person should be able to get out the door by 8 am.”  But by now, the children are moving faster, and they are bored.  In the time it took you to find something in your closet that doesn’t make you look pregnant, they turned your calm morning shower into a spectator event, and asked for no less than five Band-Aids.  The older kids found a cable channel that necessitated an immediate family meeting while the younger ones smeared toothpaste all over the bathroom floor.

At 8 am, you will forget to use your inside voice.

But 9:00 am is worst of all.  It is sneaky like a toddler with scissors.  By then, you’ve had time to wrestle yourself into a pair of extra-strength Spanx and fished your missing earring out of the Lego bin.  You have cancelled cable and issued several murderous threats to the next little person who barges in on you in the bathroom.

You’ve had time to drink any coffee the kids haven’t spilled, and with caffeine coursing through your veins, you dominate the to-do list.  At 9 am, you are the master of the morning routine!

Ah…but that is the trap.  Disillusioned by your own awesomeness and feeling a little lightheaded from the lack of oxygen to the Spanxed region, you begin to think, “I am so with it this morning!  I think I have time to mop the floor and make cookies for the kids!”

Blissfully unaware of the danger, you skip happily toward the tasks that will lead to your undoing.  Suddenly, you look up and it’s 8:45.  8:45 and you smell like Pine Sol and snickerdoodles.  The dog is wearing your daughter’s back pack and you are pretty sure their bus driver was serious when she said she expected your kindergartener to be wearing pants before he got on the bus.

9 am is the Siren song of the morning.  You may as well just take the rest of the day off for an awkward yearly physical because things are not going to get any better.

But by 10 am, Morning has begun to slither slowly toward another time zone.  The Sirens stop singing.  No one is crying.  The caffeine is in full-effect.   At 10 am, we can walk out the door for church and all the kids will have their hair brushed and their faces wiped clean of the breakfast I had to force-feed them.  Everyone has shoes on the right feet and I do not look like I need Botox for my premature frown lines.  By 10 am, I could write the book on parenting.

Just don’t ask me to do it at 9:45.

My Latest and Greatest Giveaway

The most amazing cloths in the world!

Earlier this week, I promised a giveaway because Five in Tow has reached over 600 Facebook fans!  Plus, I’ve welcomed many new e-mail subscribers since the last giveaway.  Welcome!

I love doing giveaways because it gives me a chance to say thank you, at least in a small way, to all of you who support my blog.  You allow me to do what I love, to be very real and very me, and (so far) you keep coming back.  Thank you!  Because you’re so great, I have a great giveaway for you.

A few months ago, my friend Andrea sent me a box full of Norwex cleaning products.  She said she thought of me when she started using them, and I thought, “How does she know my house is a mess?”  But she said, “No, I thought of you because you’re into natural stuff.”  Oh.  “Use everything in the box,” she said.  “I know you’re going to love it!”

Her optimism was encouraging, but what Andrea didn’t know is that I haven’t had much luck with natural cleaning products.  First off, they’re almost always more expensive than their toxic counterparts.  Second, they don’t always work.  Not really.  But I use them because I can’t stand the thought of polluting my home with harmful chemicals.  So I scrub away with my ineffective green cleaners and console myself with the fact that most people are never going to see the inside of my shower anyway.

But Andrea is a friend so I had to open the box.  One of the things inside was a set of two cloths, an Enviro cloth and a polishing cloth.  Andrea said I could clean my entire house with these two cloths and nothing but water, and when I was done, I could hang them up and they’d self-purify.  Uh-huh.

I set to work using her voodoo products.  I cleaned my mirrors.  I cleaned my windows, counter tops, stove, sinks, shower and stainless steel fridge.  I even cleaned the fingerprints and other kid-griminess off the white trim around our doors.  UNBELIEVABLE.   These cloths did exactly what Andrea said they’d do, only better because now my house was clean.

I was on a little bit of a kick now so I cleaned my sliding glass door, the one that no matter how hard I clean, it always looks dirty as soon as the sun shines through it.  I wiped it with the wet Enviro cloth, then polished it with a dry polishing cloth.  There were absolutely no streaks.  None.  Not only that, but it took a fraction of the time, I didn’t use any chemicals or paper towels, and the result was better than anything I had ever tried before.  I had my daughter do another window, just to see if technique mattered.  As it turned out, my nine-year-old could clean the windows just as well as I could using these products.  You couldn’t even tell a kid washed the window.  Guess who has a new chore?  Bwahahaha!

After I finished my cleaning spree, I did a little research.  I found out Norwex cloths use two types of technology.  They’re made of high-quality microfiber that picks up all the microscopic bits of dirt and bacteria in your home and traps it inside.  But what is really amazing to me is that the cloths are woven with silver, so once the dirt is inside, the silver kills the germs and keeps new bacteria from growing.  Silver is naturally antimicrobial.  Bacteria can’t grow on it.  In fact, hospitals use silver bandages on burn patients because burn victims are so susceptible to infection.

When you are done cleaning, you simply rinse out the cloths, hang them up, and the silver kills the bacteria and purifies the cloths so they’re ready to use again.  You can use them multiple times before washing them in the washing machine (be sure not to use fabric softener—it coats the silver and the microfiber and makes it less effective) and they won’t smell or spread bacteria around your home.  Plus, unlike my other green cleaners, they are actually more effective than anything I’ve ever used before and are completely non-toxic (it’s just water!).  Amazing.

By now, you’ve probably guessed what the giveaway is: Norwex cloths!!!  One lucky winner will get a set of two Norwex cloths.  You are going to love them!

To enter, please share your favorite Five in Tow story with your friends.  Many of you have already shared and shared and shared my stories, but I’d love it if you would do it one more time because it’s amazing how this one act has helped to bring new readers to my site.  For example, How to Get your Toddler to Eat Anything has been shared over 8,000 times on Facebook, and over 18,000 people read it in one day.  Counting the Hours has been shared over 5,000 times and is my all-time most popular post.  That’s the power you have, wonderful readers!

So, pick a favorite post and share it on Facebook, Twitter, or by carrier pigeon.  It doesn’t really matter.  Then, come back and leave a comment about the story you shared (this is my covert way of learning what kinds of posts you like best, so choose wisely).  I’ll also give extra entries to anyone who knows a good literary agent or publisher.  I may even kiss your feet.

One reader will be drawn at random on Wednesday, August 29th.  Please allow 2 weeks to receive your prize.  Thanks for participating!

 

Sorrow and the Beautiful Love

The clouds, heavy with sorrow, bent over the sky, deep and gray and so full of tears they could not cry.  It seemed the weight of their anguish would crush the earth, but the weeping would not come.

It had been such a beautiful thing.  That was the irony: only a beautiful thing could leave such an ugly wound.  Only a beautiful thing could hurt like this.

“It will get better,” they said, as if they knew.  They who did not even believe such beautiful things exist.

But she did not want it to get better.  She wanted the sorrow to roll over her and consume her.  She wanted to feel it breaking her.  It was all she had left, this side of love that felt like drowning, like flesh being torn from flesh.  She couldn’t let it go, even though it hurt to hang on, because it was the closest she could get to what she once had.

“Someday, this is going to hurt,” her brain had once tried to tell her what her heart would not hear.  “There is no easy way out of love.”

But by the time she realized it might be that kind of love, it was too late.  Looking back, she was astonished by how quickly it had happened, and how irrevocably she was changed, so that now, in the darkness of her sorrow, she was unable to remember how to see, how to feel, how to be like before.  It seemed she could only see in shadows.

Frenzied, her mind tried to find a way to put everything back the way it was.  It woke her, desperate to convince her that nothing had changed.  It told her they were wrong, that it hadn’t happened, that soon she would find out that it was all a big mistake, and she could run again to her love and hold on for all eternity.

But this was not the kind of thing that could be undone with wishful thinking or sheer power of will.  This was the kind of thing that could never be put right, not while one piece of her was in time, and the other in eternity.

The morning came, hushed and dimly lit, with little to distinguish it from the fading of the night.  Morning, noon, and evening were nothing but a collection of indistinct hours marked by indistinct rising and falling of darkness.  Always there would be darkness, darkness in the air and in the sky, darkness in the shadows that seemed to be a part of her now.

But this kind of love cannot be darkened by shadows.  This kind of love, this beautiful love, cannot be divided by death.

The tears came, and with them, the clouds began to lighten.  Almost imperceptibly, the light filtered through, pushing the shadows to the edges of the pools where her memories drifted.   The shadows sharpened as the light grew stronger, defining and outlining the very things she couldn’t make out before.

Suddenly, she realized she could see.  With breathless clarity she saw the radiance of that beautiful love, not taken from her, but given back to her in its fullness, cleared of all imperfections.  Indeed, it was more real than ever before.

She ran to it and clung to it, this kind of love, this rare, beautiful love, that had come through the darkness and emerged incorruptible.

*Dedicated to my grandma, who lost her beautiful love one year ago today.  “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face…” 

For more of this kind of love, read the remarkable story of one woman’s grief redeemed in John 20.