Brought to You by Cold Weather, Crayons, and My Dead Cat

For the past two weeks, I've woken up between 3:00-5:00 in the morning nearly every day. Not by choice, of course. Normally on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I get up at 5:15 to go walking with a couple of friends. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I "sleep in" until 6:15 (in theory - I often still wake up at "walking time"), and then I get up with Nicky for when he gets ready for school. I don't have to get up with Nicky since he's pretty independent and responsible about getting out of bed and getting ready, but I feel like I should be up and available during that time. But lately, I wake up between 3:00-5:00, and I can't go back to sleep. I roll over, look at the clock, and think, "Nooooooo!" and then I try to convince my brain to not activate. I need it to shut right back down, and if it does, it only takes about thirty seconds for my four-year-old to sense it and come wandering into my room. So I act like I'm asleep as I try to maintain my brain shut-down, and I think, "Please choose Dad! Please choose Dad! Dad can go back to sleep! I can't!" but she only chooses Dad 10% of the time.

This morning, being a Wednesday, I normally would have woken up at 5:15 to go walking, but today is a horribly bizarre weather day, and the forecast said it would only be 13°. That's what I call "booger freezing" weather. And my walking companions were more than happy to bow out. With that came the possibility of "sleeping in" until 6:15, and I really believed it was going to happen!

Imagine my disappointment when, just after 5:00 a.m. we heard a loud crash and the sound of hundreds of small items rolling across a floor. Scotty and I sprung awake, and my initial thought was, "Stupid cat!" (because even after being gone for four years, I still always assume every little noise is the cat, and I hear all sorts of phantom cat sounds through the night, which makes me wonder how many sounds I thought were the cat but actually weren't the cat back when we had a cat) (are you getting me here?)

Anyway, loud crash.

Hundreds of rolling objects.

No cat.

Scotty got out of bed to investigate. It ended up being a large box of crayons falling off the top bunk in Zoe and Eva's room which has laminate flooring. Zoe insists on sleeping with crayons and a notebook, and every night before bed she draws mountain landscapes and creatures with big eyes. I guess it's good that it was crayons falling off the bed and not Zoe (the risk of using bunk beds from the 70's, but man, those things are sturdy like nothing I've ever seen from our modern-day furniture selection).

Clearly I wouldn't be going back to sleep.

Right on cue, the four-year-old came wandering into our room.

I thought, "Well, at least I have some free time to blog."

And that, my friends, is how this masterpiece of a blog post came to be.

Stay warm today!