Breakfast
Breakfast time.
In the DiNozzo household, it had once been a quiet, easy affair; passable on occasions as they were called out to work, used as romantic gestures on others.
Then Tony had been born, and suddenly, 'breakfast' blurred into early morning, which blurred into the rest of the day, and Ziva found herself forgetting what this foreign idea was, as sleep came fitfully, and in naps with her son.
As time went on, two more were added to the brood, and she'd given up the idea that it would ever return to a simple pleasure undertaken each morning. Now, with 3 school-going children, a husband and a job, breakfast was practically a military operation, and everybody played their own part.
Timmy was almost always the first one up, the first one to sit down at the table, and the first one to leave the house. On school mornings, he awoke like early, like clockwork (something Ziva was proud to say he'd inherited from her), and always had clean uniform, and his homework completed. She loved the time she found with him; he would often recite morning prayer with her, the two would eat breakfast together, the morning news in the background, and talk easily. It may not have been the breakfast of old, but it was peaceful, and usually gave her a bright start to her morning.
Her eldest son, on the other hand, was poles apart from his younger brother; it was like chalk and cheese. She heard his alarm go off, the unamused grunts she knew as his new-found teenage language followed, before he decided to roll back over. She would wake him several times, only to be on the end of a grumpy, snappy reply, as he clung desperately to any time in bed, before finally conceding as she threatened to drag him out of bed by his ear. After finally being pulled from his duvet, Tony would slouch his way downstairs, forgoing clothes for a pair of boxers or sweatpants, and collapse in a chair, managing to pour himself a bowl of cereal, and chomp through, doing a remarkable impression of a member of the undead. Ziva spent the next twenty minutes chewing his ear off, often giving him a slap to accompany it, before the boy would finally disappear upstairs, shower and change. It was a miracle he missed the bus as few times as he did, in her opinion.
Abigail was not far behind this record, but for far different reasons than laziness. She was often awake early, but spent most of her time showering, fretting over her clothes and hair, and trying to apply make-up, text and eat breakfast all at once. Ziva had tried to convince her several times that she needed none of it, but Abi was not to be swayed (despite the regular ridicule from her father and brothers). She was set in her ways, and in her mother's opinion (despite the make-up), she was always beautiful, much to Tony's chagrin of course (her father would much rather she went to school in a bin bag, armed to the teeth with pepper spray and possibly a taser in her bag, with a deep loathing of anything male).
The patriarch himself, of course, could not be forgotten. Ziva often swore she had 4 children when it came to mornings; Tony had clearly taken after his father. The elder DiNozzo was famous for his rants aimed at the alarm clock, the fights with the shower, the curses aimed at the cat when he went flying over it, and the speed at which he could descend the stairs when Ziva reminded him just how late he was running. Somehow, and his wife was yet to work out what witchcraft or voodoo was used, he always looked pristine, even when awakening 10 minutes before leaving the house (not that she minded, of course; she liked him in a suit, after all..).
Then it was a quick flurry of goodbyes, kisses, 'don't forget!'s, sarcasm and laughter, and the house was empty, three children making their way to the bus and the parents fighting the morning DC traffic. As Ziva glanced over paperwork, and Tony alternated between cursing fellow drivers, and singing his heart out to any song on the radio, they shared a content smile, and she found it hard to imagine the day when there would be silence again in the mornings.