Travels and an Electronic Rooster

Thursday afternoon, I started writing a new blog post. This is what I wrote:

Tomorrow, bright and early if I have anything to say about it, the kids and I load up and drive 10 hours to visit my parents in South Dakota. Elliot has yet to make the trek and meet Grandpa, and we haven’t been back in a long time. I can’t remember when we were there last. Blaine has to work, so he’ll be staying home.

Right about the time I looked up from my typing and editing, I looked around the living room and decided to rearrange. You know, because trying to pack eight people to go to South Dakota for a couple weeks isn’t stress enough for one day. Apparently cleaning is my coping mechanism – like the time I scrubbed the siding to avoid packing. My living room looks better, a few things got moved around, and by the time I finally finished packing I fell into bed for our 5am wake time.

When the alarms… that story in a minute – went off at 5am, the kids were almost all awake, and we headed down the stairs to get ready to go. About the time I hit the bottom step, the electricity went off. It never came back on before we left. We’d packed the van before we went to bed the night before, but getting the final few things in the dark with flashlights added a fun spin on things.

I think all we left was bibs.

We’re at my parent’s house in South Dakota, after an uneventful trip, driving 650 miles in 10.5 hours. Ellie cried briefly, but other than that, it wasn’t anything too stressful.

A few days ago, Liberty asked me if there was a way to put an alarm clock on her Kindle. I found an app, and she’s been getting up at 6am ever since. She finished her math and spelling and English before 8:30am one day this week! Self motivated, that one is. Sterling also has a Kindle, and he has the same app. He set his to a rooster’s crow, he has a password on his Kindle just to turn it on, and then, to top it off, he set it to have to answer 7 math problems to make it stop crowing. He sleeps hard, and the scene in the bedroom earlier this week went something like this. Liberty was up, heard the crowing, and tried to get it to stop before the babies woke up.

“Sterling. Sterling. Wake up! Type in your password.”

He typed it in, wrong, retyped it, and finally got in. All the while, the rooster is crowing without ceasing. Obnoxious, most definitely.

He got to the math problems. In his sleepy state, math wasn’t computing. Pretty soon, he was hollering out questions.

“What’s 8-4?” Liberty gave him the answer, he typed it in.

“What’s 6-5?” Again, Liberty answered. The rooster kept crowing, Liberty would whisper the answers as quietly as she could from across the room, and by the time his seven questions were all answered and the crowing stopped, the whole house was awake,. It was so funny I couldn’t help but giggle through the whole exchange. What a fun way to start the day… earlier than I’d planned.