You know you're a parent of young kids when...

Last Saturday morning, we had one of those 'you know you're the parents of two young children when' moments.

At 5 a.m., after a feeding, Alex didn't want to go back to sleep in her bed but was perfectly happy to sleep in someone's arms. So Ryan took her to the couch so that I could catch another couple of hours. But just before 6 a.m., Austin woke up because of a nightmare so I went into his room to comfort him. I ended up lying down with him for a few minutes, and fell back asleep (as did he).

So at 7 a.m., when Alex woke up and wanted to be fed again, Ryan found me in Austin's room instead of in our room.

The 'moment' in all this? You know you're parents of young children when you don't wake up next to each other, but wake up next to your children. And that's what happened -- Ryan fell asleep with Alex and I fell asleep with Austin.

That moment was followed by two other moments that morning that solidified the parents of young children status. The first was that the phone rang at 7:15 a.m. On the line was a friend of ours, who also has two young kids, letting us know that he was leaving shortly to take junk to the dump and would then be swinging by our house with his trailor to take our junk to the dump.

Why is this a moment? Because he didn't think twice about the fact that 7:15 a.m. was an unreasonable time to call on a Saturday morning. Parents of young children are up at that hour.

About an hour later, he was at our house, and him and Ryan became 'those people', using a power saw to cut down logs to fit in the trailor.

Now that we all have kids, how quickly we forgot how much we hated those people who were out making noise early in the morning!

So it's official, although I've been a parent for two years now, I think the status is now solidified. Pretty soon, I guess I'm going to find myself with more toys than personal stuff in my purse and knowing the words to every nursery rhyme ever written. And probably many more nights not lying in bed next to my husband.