Bad Parents

This is what 12:15 am on Saturday night/Sunday morning looked like at our house last weekend. The oldest and the youngest - the sweet girls - were passed out on the couch, and the boys, well, the boys were still playing Wii and sword fighting and making plans and inventing games and roughhousing and arguing and problem-solving like best friends do.

The pictures are terrible, but I was trying not to wake the girls so I turned the flash off.

To be clear, not every Saturday night looks like this. On most Saturday nights, the kids are in bed by 8pm and Tom is zonked on the couch by 10pm.

When I was a little girl my family would often spend evenings with our camping family. There was a "rule" - perhaps once spoken and then unspoken after that - that as long as all of us kids didn't bother our parents, break anything, injure each other, or fight, we could stay (or stay up, if the gathering was at our house). I think the same "rule" will apply to Will and Hallie.

So we weren't the best parents that night, letting our kids stay up until the following day, but in our kids' eyes we certainly weren't the worst parents either.