An After Hours Adventure

With a four year old and eleven month old, late nights out are a thing of the past. Matt and I are both night owls, and Sophie definitely is as well, but we are big respecters of the bedtime routine. Now Soph very often sees 10 p.m. and occasionally even 11 p.m., but she sees it from her room reading books with a flashlight or listening to stories on cd. Will, on the other hand, rarely sees 8 p.m., as he needs to get his rest so he can begin his quest for total domination at 7 a.m. each morning. He wakes up ready to eat, play, eat, play  and eat a bit more - preferably in that order. Wonder of wonders, we seem to have a morning person on our hands. Heaven help us. At any rate, last night we wrapped up our typical bedtime routine, (with a round of 

Memory thrown in for good measure), and I came to collapse into a chair, got online and found friends on facebook talking about snow! I immediately rushed to the window and began yelling like a maniac for Sophie to get downstairs to see the snow. Somehow the sound of his mother screaming like a banshee woke Will up, even over the noise from his sound machine! So we all wound up outside wearing pjs and whatever shoes were closest to the door. (We eventually rounded up coats and a couple of hats, but not before bursting through the front door into the whirling blizzard of snow. (Actually I probably could have counted the flakes, but we live in Atlanta, and we take what we can get...)

Watching Sophie and her friend across the street make plans for the snowball fights, s

led races, and snowman building was bittersweet, as we adults realized that we'd be lucky to have even a few flakes left the next morning. (We weren't so lucky, to say the ground was frost-covered would be a bit of a stretch.) But all in all, our after hours excitement was worth the cold noses and bit of trouble getting back to bed. 

We need our routines, but we also need a break from them. We need to know what to expect, and we need to experience the unexpected. And as much as we want to create a sense of security and stability in our children, we also want to make memories and go on adventures - even if they happen after hours.