Winter Wonderland Wakeup

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Our kids have embarked on a diabolical mission to deprive us parents of as much sleep as possible. Not a happy development - anyone who knows me knows I need me some sleep. It's mostly Gregory. He's developed an irrational fear of the doors in our house (he's not afraid of what he thinks might be on the other side of the door, but the actual rectangular piece of wood). All I can get out of him is that he thinks the 2 squares at the top of the door look like eyes. Go figure. Anyway, he's been waking up most nights between the hours of 1 and 5 AM. He pads down the stairs and climbs into our bed, following up with his patented 'I scared' with a request for 'something to drink', 'kid TV', or usually, both. Kids, here's a little secret. Your Mom and Dad will let you get away with just about anything, if it means they don't have to get up between the hours of 1 and 5 AM. If we can get him to go back to sleep, or even lay quietly, a lot of the time we just let him be and go back to sleep ourselves(bad us!).

Sunday morning was a prime example. He came downstairs sometime around 4:00 AM, asking for 'kid TV'. He tossed and turned for at least an hour, managing to bump into Greg or myself every time one of us started drifting back to sleep. Finally, under threat of being sent back to his bed, he quieted down and miraculously fell asleep. By 6 AM, Greg and I had rejoined the sweet world of Sunday morning sleep.

But fate was against us. Saturday night into early Sunday morning we had our first December snow fall here in Central Massachusetts. Only a couple of inches, but apparently that's enough to be wildly exciting in the pre-Christmas world of a 6 year old. At 7 AM, Rebecca burst into our room yelling 'Wake up! Waaake upppp! It's a Winter Wonderland outside. Wake Up! Waaake uppp!'

This didn't go over so well, except with Gregory who went from sleep to wide awake in 2 secondes flat. He jumped out of bed, and excitedly ran around the house with his big sister, looking out the windows. OK, that last part was kind of cute, even though I knew my Sunday morning slumber was over.

Here they are playing in the snow. Is anybody else's kids obsessed with pretending to be bears?

To make sure we don't let down our guard, Mother Nature hit us with another snowstorm today. School was canceled and Rebecca ventured out into the icy outdoors this morning for about an hour before declaring 'the storm is too much for me'.

She promptly changed back into her pj's, put on 'Spirit', and drank some hot cocoa from her very cool bunny mug (I know you guys are all jealous of the bunny mug!).
Nature has been on a making herself known around here lately. Last night on the way home from gymnastics a coyote ran in front of our van, only 50 feet away from our driveway. There was no traffic on the road, so I stopped and turned the car slightly until our headlights washed across him. He just stood there on the other side of a stone wall, staring at us for a minute, and turned away and trotted toward the far side of the field. Rebecca was got a good look at him and was very excited since coyotes are one of her favorite animals.