The Case for CCTV

Myself and the boys have a little game that we like to play. They get up to random mischief, I give out to them, they pretend to respect me as an authority figure and act repentant. Then as soon as I turn my back, they resume whatever mischief they were in the middle of.

Tonight’s mischief follows a familiar pattern that I have already described here. In fact, since I wrote that post I am only surprised when I go up to their room and the furniture hasn’t been rearranged. I would guess that the average time between being put to bed and actually falling asleep is somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour.
I’m very tempted to put a camera in the room just to see what accompanies the soundtrack that we hear through the monitor. So far tonight;

• I have listened to the usual gibberish for about twenty minutes, punctuated by giggling, singing, shouting and screeching in various stages.
• I went up to the room when I heard some genuine crying and found that Monkey Boy had somehow hit his head off the side of the cot. [Of course, all the blankets, pillows and anything not nailed down had been strewn around the room.]
• I went up again for more genuine crying and found Fat Chops holding his head and grinning at how clever he was for using the same excuse as Monkey Boy to get Daddy to run back up the stairs. [No harm going up to them, turns out I needed to make the beds anyway.]
• The last time I heard them jumping up and down and bouncing the cots off the walls so I went in and did a really convincing job of acting stern and told them to lie down and go to sleep or else [after I made the beds. AGAIN!!]. The boys for their part did a really good job of only grinning a little bit and not laughing at me overtly.

Yesterday, we put the boys up for an afternoon nap and they bounced off the walls for about an hour and a half before we gave up completely and took them downstairs. Fat Chops handled the lack of nap pretty well and spent the afternoon helping Hannah around the garden. Monkey Boy did not handle it so well, he spent about five minutes in the garden moaning about every little thing before gratefully accepting my invitation to come inside and watch TV. As I suspected, he drifted off within minutes of getting comfortable and got a half hour shuteye. Fat Chops got increasingly cranky as the night wore on and eventually persuaded us to put them to bed early. For once, we were confident that there would be no messing after bedtime and for once, the boys didn’t prove us wrong. Monkey Boy did cry after twenty minutes and Hannah went up to him and asked him what was wrong. He looked up with a jutting lip, pointed across to his brothers cot and said “Fat Chops asleep”*. Poor lad was upset because his partner in crime had gone asleep and he had no one to play with!

*He said nothing of the sort but I’ve stuck with their nicknames this long, I might as well misquote him.