I love how, on our birthdays, or Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, our kids wake us up loooooooong before the alarm clock rings to wish us a happy whatever-day-it-is.

(This is also true of Christmas, Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, and any and all quasi-holidays or just the random exciting Saturday.)

(I am able to say an unqualified “I love how…” and not a more carefully worded “isn’t it cute-but-ironic how…” because it’s not my birthday this week. It’s Dane’s.)

You’d think that after a while we’d work out a system where the person whose birthday it ISN’T gets up early and distracts the children until the birthday person wakes up, but no. We have no such system.

And I don’t expect we ever will, because for one thing, getting up early on purpose is not in our DNA, and for another, how could we even contain that much excitement? The sleeping person would surely be woken by the sheer volume of anticipation pulsating through the children house.

So our kids will continue wish us each a very early birthday until they’re old enough that they want to sleep in, too, and then we’ll wonder what happened to the days when they’d poke us awake, whisper-shouting: Happy birthday! It’s your birthday! Get up get up get up! Happy birthday!

I wonder what we’ll do instead, then.