Shhhh the house is quiet!

Yes, absolutely still! It is a beautiful sound. The kids have been stir crazy lately. I think it is the late winter thing going on. Recently it has been too cold to be outdoors (today there was wind chill again making it 4 below or something like that) and yet there is the feeling of being on the cusp of the change of seasons. Spring in theory isn't far off. I see the change in animal behavior both in our pets and in the wild ones we watch out of doors. They feel the change and are friskier. Alas so are my children and they evidence this by contests for jumping off the couch, dropping dominos on one anothers heads and loud, loud (did I say LOUD???) voices. In something like 4 or 5 weeks I will once more be able to temper that energy with walks and play after supper out of doors. I keep saying that to myself. I need to believe it. I need to vision it. Because till every last little demon----i mean child----fell asleep tonight it was bedlam.

Much of it is I think that our winter pass times are somewhat old hat now. We have done copious quantities of arts and crafts. Pretty much you name the medium, and we have done it. And done it more than once; partly for the fun factor, partly to subtly give opportunities for further creative mastery and exploration. And sometimes, just because I didn't know what else to fill the hours with till bedtime! LOL We've done glitter glue, painting, relief painting, stencils, foam art, markers, crayons, cutting, glue. . . I assure you the list is endless and the messes have been mostly happy and fun. But now, they are less fun. The attention spans shorten as the little bodies yearn to be leaping and running about. Sigh. So we play football in the front hall, have basketball contests into buckets and boxes and race matchbox motorcycles. But I know it will be better with the change of the season. It always is.

Added to the mix is the fact that KC has not been sleeping well lately. A few nights of bad dreams (usually involving monkeys; don't ask me why monkeys are scary as I have no idea!) I think in his mind his solution was to make himself stay awake longer. Of course in my experience, when one has bad dreams, they are typically worsened if one is over tired. Which is pretty much what happened to him.

But all week he has made himself stay awake until 9 pm at which point I would take him upstairs to bed with me and sing him to sleep. I can't honestly go up sooner than that as I have to do my piece work stuff. Usually he falls asleep on the couch about 8 p.m. or so and I just carry him up when I am done, but all week he has come into the work room with his crayons and done art on the floor by my work area, assuring me he has "just one more picture to make." In the morning when I get up at 5:45 a.m. he has been popping up like a little spring ready to start the day. Now i need to explain that all my alarm does is literally make a soft click. It is set to play classical music but I am afraid of wakening the kids so I have the volume all the way off. So really there is no noise to wake KC or Lissa. And that means the only thing wakening KC is his fear of bad dreams if he is in the room alone. Sigh.

Tonite we talked about the bad dreams and the monkeys--do you know how hard it is to talk about monkeys being scary with a straight face???? And I assured him over and over that I would keep him safe always, even from monkeys. He fell asleep on the couch at 7 p.m. I hope it worked and his sleep is sweet and happy. I hate it when my kids don't sleep happy.

Rob had a lot of sleep issues for a really long time. His I understood as really scary things did happen to him in the dark and/or when he was sleeping. And he saw creepy R rated movies when he was 4 and 5 years old. He would waken in the night screaming literally. Or worse, be screaming and yet not awake. Later, he would sleep walk when stressed or over tired, which petrified me as our bedrooms are on the second floor. I had a door chime on his bedroom door for years. It would not waken him, but I would hear it and be out of my bed before he would get to the stairs. Thankfully, over the years this seems to have gotten a lot better. So I know KC's will also, especially as his fears are more developmentally appropriate and not the result of trauma. No R rated movies with killer monkeys have been on Channel 2's PBS playlist! :-)

Meanwhile, I am like a kid in a candy store with the house being quiet and the kids all abed at the same time. I saw a movie; a WHOLE movie. I finished watching the tv show I taped and saw in 10 minute increments all week. (I won't watch anything adult when the kids are up; I either have totally G stuff on or I just play music) And I had time to write a blog entry. Talk about living large! :-)