I spent the last week solo parenting my 5 year old while DH was traveling for work. This is a rare occurrence for him, so this was a rare occasion for me to be on my own with my daughter and something interesting happened and I'm curious about what to do with it.

DH and I both WOH, and because of our schedules and commutes, I leave for work before LO is up, and then I leave work earlier to pick her up from school. DH gets up with me, showers and gets ready, and then wakes up our daughter and gets her ready. If she doesn't wake up by herself by 7:45ish, he wakes her, and usually they leave the house around 9-9:15. On a pretty regular basis I hear from DH about how hard LO is to wake up, how she doesn't want to get out of bed, how she wants to play instead of eating breakfast, etc. Mornings just seem to be rough for him and her both.

Well, I saw none of that this week. At all. I woke LO up at 7:30 every day, and she got up pretty easily within 10 minutes of me waking her up. By 8 AM she was at the table eating breakfast. I did have to nudge her to keep eating, because she gets distracted easily, but that's typical for her. We were out the door by 8:30 every day with no issues of any kind.

I don't doubt that my husband does have these troubles with her, but I'm really not sure why we had some disparate experiences. I told him about this and he asked me for a full rundown of what I did, so I told him, and it doesn't seem very different from what he does. I might have just gotten lucky, but I would really hate for them to go back to their rougher dynamic once we're back to our old routine when he's back. He's not resistant to change at all, so I'm sure he'll try to replicate whatever I did (even though it's not different from what he does), and he's a pretty calm, laid back guy, so I can't figure out why our experiences are so different. I also realize kids react differently to different parents, but our daughter spends time with us pretty equally and we're both very hands on, equal duty parents, so I don't know if that's the case here at all.

Any thoughts/ideas/suggestions?