Impatient...

It's Hannah's birthday week and for a gift, we decided to get her a Nintendo DS. (It's a handheld gaming system, in case you've never heard of it.) She's a little young for it, but uses her brother's DS all the time while he's at school. She plays educational games, creates plays with sound-bites and takes a ton of pictures (and edits them!) all by herself. So, naturally, we thought it would be a great device for her, especially since we have some long car rides in our near future. Anyhoo, we've had this gift for a couple of weeks and told Caleb about it, thinking he would like to know. He was very happy to know the secret but decided that he was too impatient to wait for Hannah to open her gift on her actual birthday. We had a family birthday party for Hannah a couple weeks ago, and Caleb was begging for her to open her gift that day. We explained to her that if she opens it at her party then she wouldn't have any gifts to open on her actual birthday. She thought about it....and decided to wait. (That's my girl!) Every day until her birthday, Caleb would ask Hannah if she wanted to open her gift on that day, and every day she would tell him that she wanted to wait. (I think the cat got out of the bag at some point and she actually knew what her gift was, but still, she didn't want to see it or open it until her birthday.) Finally, it was the night before her birthday. Caleb just couldn't wait any longer and I told him that if Hannah was awake before he went to school the next morning, he could watch her open her gift. The kids went to bed with the wonderful motivation that they only have the night before their birthday and on Christmas Eve. As soon as they were asleep, Chris and I got to work blowing up a couple bags of pink and purple balloons to put in Hannah's room and I took a generic "Happy Birthday" sign and hung it across Hannah's closet. I was excited to hear her shriek when she woke up and saw her room the next morning.

Let's just fast forward to the next morning, shall we? Let's say....3:30am. Yes, that's right. It's dark. It's the middle of the night. Technically, it was already Hannah's birthday, but technically, I'm still sleeping and don't care about technicalities. So, you can imagine my "delight" (enter sarcastic icon here) when Caleb marches into our room with a huge MagLight flashlight shining in my face and a very tired (probably still asleep) Hannah trailing behind him. You might be saying "Oh, no he didn't....". Well, yes, yes, he did. He woke up, decided now would be the perfect time for Hannah to open her gift, woke HER up and proceeded to plead his case. In a not very happy way (understatement), I told both kids to go back to bed. Let's fast-forward again to 6:30am (before our alarms go off on a typical morning), when Caleb, once again, snuck into our bedroom and whispered to me that he was going to go ahead and wake Hannah up. No, no, no, I told him. It's Hannah's birthday and he needs to let her sleep. In the end, he walked right into her room and turned on her light (what a rude awakening!). She got over the initial disturbance rather well and ended up being just as excited as he was to open her gift and have a "birthday pancake" (aka, pancakes with a candle in them). It was a fun day full of cupcakes and all things "Hannah". I don't think we'll be letting Caleb in on any birthday secrets for a few years because he turns out to be more impatient than the birthday person!!