I get up early in the morning, therefore the alarm clock is set for me, though it is a rare day that I awake after 4:30, well before it sounds. I come upstairs, sip my coffee and Splenda, prepare my breakfast, take my vitamins, and jot down my thoughts. It is the preferred way to begin a day in Laura Land.

At seven or eight, I trod down to our bedroom and climb into bed behind Miles and rub his back, murmuring his name, to awaken him for the day. He usually greets me quite jovially and cuddles back a bit. This morning was not so much in line with the usual reaction.

It was a clumsy beginning anyway, after a cat startled me while brushing my teeth and I spit most of the toothpaste on my chin and shirt. Then, my mouth filled to the brim with mouthwash, I had a sneezing fit. Use your imagination. I could be a walking deodorant commercial: "I just ate onions, but you'd never know it to smell my chest!" It was with these experiences in my recent history that I prepared to wake my cute husband.

I massaged his back, his neck, talking to him, greeting him. He mumbled something incoherent, and I continued stroking, cooing, until he muttered that I stole one of his pillows last night and he had to wait until I got up to steal it back. Humored but thinking better of humility over laughter, I apologized and became properly self-derisive of my pillow philandering ways.

I lingered over a knot in his spine and massaged it out, issuing butterfly kisses, still doing my damnedest to coax him awake. Finally he rolled over, squinting into the dim light and raising one of his gentle-giant hands to pummel my forehead. It felt like a brushing of flower petals upon my skin and I giggled at the unexpected response. "I don't have a snooze button, Honey."

He nodded against my claim and proceeded to execute the move no less than five times. Finally, he groaned and flipped to his front, flinging a hand over his head. Feeling sympathetic, I offered, "I'll come back in ten minutes, how does that sound?" He grunted affirmatively and I pranced upstairs to inhale more of the peppermint fumes from the bathroom and update the site.

...And it strikes me that my snooze button worked after all. My husband...he's no fool. I guess looks really are  deceiving.

While I am, unarguably, the shortest member of my family, It is not by a terribly wide margin. My ancestors were tall, husky Scandinavians...and then something went amok in the breeding and we kept the husky but dropped the tall. We've even managed to pick up "stout" and "painfully awkward", but that doesn't really pertain to this entry.

When I first met Miles, his height didn't strike me as obscene, for I was used to being around people taller than me...but that was before we began living together.

He has a habit of misplacing an item while talking and pacing on the phone. I will look for hours to find said item, something desperately vital like newly purchased gum, and come up empty. It isn't until I haul a chair from room to room, situating it in the center of the perimeter and climbing aboard, that I tend to find the object. The fourteen-inch difference in our height makes itself known in these times. What the heck are the car keys doing resting on the back corner of the refrigerator, anyway? Normal people don't do that, do they?

In Wilmington, there were many mornings that we frantically searched for his wallet, and I don't know how many times we'd resort to calling his cell phone just to figure out where it was hiding. It was worse there, when I had our microwave seated at the top of the refrigerator. More high surfaces to take advantage of...just what I needed.

Here, it is no different...and it is the DVD handling that hooks me most often. We finish watching a movie together, on those rare nights when I don't fall asleep first, and I rise to extract the disc and tuck it away in the stash. One problem: where's the damn case!? I'll pull out every under-bed storage container looking for it, only to find it placed high atop the TV. It's enough to make someone of shorter stature crazy.

I think I am going to begin tucking things in low nooks so that he can't find them. Socks, underwear, and the like. Oh, and I think I am going to hide the cookies in one place he'll never look: the cleaning supply closet.