I wake up early.
I mean REALLY early……..
4:45 am each day, even on weekends.
I have the perfect house for an early riser such as myself. The entire east side is covered with huge windows giving me a panoramic view of each sunrise over the Eagle Cap Wilderness.
At times, breathtaking.
The promise of a new day.
A fresh start.
The crack of dawn…..
Enter….. stage left…….Cooper…….
How many mornings did we sit in the living room as the sun would peek over the mountains and my husband, with his slow Oregon drawl, would smugly say to him,
“Listen, Coop…… did you hear that?”
Cooper would then earnestly cock his head to one side straining to hear something….
“It’s the Crack ‘a Dawn”, Steve would slowly and triumphantly declare, as if he’d just told the world’s most hilarious joke.
With a concerned frown, Cooper would look at us and then stare out the window.
After a while, his concerned frown would then change to a smile, he’d shake his head and skip off to once again catch bullfrogs, snakes, or crawdads in the creek.
This went on for years….
Until one day, as a teenager, Cooper admitted that each time my husband would say that, he’d look for a dinosaur.
A DINOSAUR????!?
Now we earnestly cocked our heads to one side straining to understand why on earth he looked for a dinosaur when Steve told him it was the “Crack ‘a Dawn”.
He just smugly looked at us and declared he was looking for a…
you know…….
a Crakadon……..
I’ll never look at a sunrise the same again. 
Have a beautiful morning!
Beth
* This was originally posted in May 2012. I thought I would repost it in honor of Cooper’s sixteenth birthday. And just in case you didn’t get to read it the first time around.
Happy Birthday Coop!!!
