Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Nocturnal meanderings

Well, Larae moved in on Saturday. She has already acquired two jobs and is gone from 7 am to 11 pm Monday through Saturday afternoon. Since I am running the open route I am never awake at 11 pm and so have not seen her since Saturday. I am gone from 2 am to 5 am. Sometimes I will cross paths with Carla as she leaves for work between 4:3o am and 5 am. I will just make it home and get nestled in bad when the alarm clock for Bart's workout goes off. He leaves the house for the gym at 5:30 am.
It is amazing that my children sleep through all of this moonlighting going on. On the other hand, it shouldn't be amazing. We bought our house with an existing alarm system. It makes a little "beep beep beep" whenever a window or door is opened or shut. It was a lovely feature when Cooper was 2 and could open the door and toodle out. We now pretty much ignore it. So when all the goings on go on during the night we all don't pay any attention. Every now and then Carla will open her window at 2 am and it will give Bart and I pause upstairs in our bedroom. We might go check on it or we may just talk about the fact that Ryan will hate that alarm when she gets older and tries to sneak out. I can't even imagine what would have happened had my mother had those kind of tools on her side during my teenage years. I started sneaking out in 6th grade.
Several months ago our fire alarm which is connected to this internal house alarm went off in the middle of the night. It was simply a battery malfunction but Bart and I were hard pressed to try and find the actual fire alarm that was causing the alarm. Scurrying was occurring hoping that the children would not wake up. I thought maybe I could shut it down via the main alarm unit on the wall. Bad idea. All of the sudden there was double and triple the alarms going off. It was so loud I had to go outside. I felt like our whole house was a big blinking red light in the middle of our quiet neighborhood. I started freaking out that the neighbors would start waking up. Here Bart was running around in his underwear with brooms trying to get to the vaulted ceiling alarms and the neighbors would be calling the police about noise infractions. The children were all but forgotten. Especially because they were still nestled in their beds with visions of flaming sugarplums dancing in their heads. Bart finally brought in a ladder and ripped the misbehaving alarm out of it's case. The silence was deafening. That was when Chase sleepily walked out of his room and asked what was going on. Ryan and Cooper never woke up.
I think we may be ready to add a puppy that whines all night long right into the mix. What do you think?

1 comment:

Jen said...

that was great! you should have been a lawyer!