SPY!!

I always say I wish I had a way to monitor the house at night to see exactly when the boys are up in the morning because they no longer come straight to me. Mark is the earliest riser and there are many mornings I know he's up before six, but I also suspect it could be even earlier.

Take Sunday night, for example. I woke up to a thud. Not a loud thud, mind you but it was obvious somebody was up. Kevin got up and caught Mark had gotten into the pantry and was opening up the marshmallow fluff I had bought at the grocery store. He actually had the inside seal partly open. This was at 4:20 am.

I don't know what he would have done if we had not heard him. Consume the entire jar of fluff? Turn on the TV and watch cartoons until an hour that would have been acceptable to be awake. These are the things I am dying to know.

Kevin and I have been talking about ways to solve our night time dilemma for awhile. We strongly believe that Mark is sleep deprived, leading to many of the cranky behaviors we see in him. So on Sunday afternoon Kevin discovered that our web cam has a motion detector video setting. Meaning we could set it up to record any time there is motion in the house when we have it turned on. It saw Mark walk down the stairs and go straight to the pantry. Unfortunately, it also caught on tape (errrrr, or rather the hard drive) Eric getting up and wrapping himself in the couch blanket and sleeping on the couch. As well as Ben going to my room and back up the stairs several times. Ben actually spent quite a bit of time in my bed, but I didn't realize he was up and down so often.

The only downsides to the video thing is that unless we wake up from the noise they make (and they are typically very sneaky!) we will not know until morning, also there is no way to tell what time the "action" occurred. To me the time is more important than watching their ornery little selves bound up and down the stairs.

However, we have a plan to solve the issue. We can just put a clock radio on the kitchen table at night and it will show the time for every little video clip.

Once we have an idea of how many times and which little boys are up in the night we will be able to find ways to keep them in their beds until an acceptable hour. At least that is my hope.

Who knew parenthood would turn us to spy tactics and surveillance? I surely did not.

Notice little boy in the lower right. Now he has a nice bed. If you can answer the question WHY? I'll be eternally grateful.

Election Day

I guess I should stop reading news headlines when I am sleep deprived and up at 5 AM because I read the headline "Turnout records fall even in GOP-friendly states" I got a little crazy wondering HOW in the world they could possibly know that given it's just now election day. Was this some sort of approximation based on the voting turnout in the early voting? How in the world with as adament as most of the people I know are about their candidate (on both sides) winning would turnout FALL from the last election. Then I clicked on the link and said to myself "OH the RECORDS are falling NOT the turnout.

Well good! I hope we blow the previous election turnout records out of the water. No matter who the vote is for.

What I don't want, however is to stand in line for 3 hours, so I'm hoping everyone around here took advantage of early voting. I, true to form, am waiting until the last minute... well the last day. I plan to vote after taking the boys to school, but will have the two littlest with me. This makes me happy that there is school though, because when I lived in GA election day was a school holiday. In the last major election I only had 2 kids to drag with me, so it wasn't a big deal, but 4 might just be too much!

So go vote everyone! I'm sure I'll be up way too late watching the results.

NaBloPoMo

I've seen lots of bloggers signing up for NaBloPoMo, and besides the name cracking me up, I decided it might be a nice challenge. The idea is to go over and sign up and commit to posting once a day, every day (even weekends) for the month of November. I post most days, but lately I seem to be so busy that I've been letting a few days pass me by... especially weekends.

So, today I was just going to be all "HEY look at my post over on Deep South Moms" (if you are here early it may not be up quite yet, but it should be posted sometime this morning!) Instead, I'll try to post something real here too... well, as real as it gets.

Many of you know I have been terrified of daylight savings time. Last year, the boys had been steadily waking at 5:45 in the days leading up to falling back. So when we actually changed the time that magic wakeup time changed to 4:45. Since 5 am has been wake up time around here, I was certain I was going to be summoned for various kid needs at 4. I was afraid...

Also, for the past few days, I've been getting up with Mark (the earliest riser) and keeping him from waking everyone else up SO early... and also using this time to get some stuff done. (Instead of waiting for the baby to wake up and wake up to disaster most mornings.) It was working pretty well except I was getting so tired after only a few days. Then there was the matter of me trying to sleep in and being unable to on Saturday.

So last night I decided... who am I kidding I couldn't hold my eyes open... to go to bed early. I was asleep by 9 and it was a good thing because I was awoken to meet different kids' needs 3 times in the night.

However, when my 5 AM alarm went off nooooo kids were up. I tried like crazy to go back to sleep, but could not, and when Mark closed my door about 10 after 5 I just got up.

I am so thankful for small miracles!