Midnight Ride

Gina's in Reno this week, left on Tuesday with her mom and their jewelry endeavors.  So we have about 5 1/2 days with out the matriarch to keep us in place.  Fortunately (and this was part of why we chose to move last week and not next week) we've got reinforcements in the house now.  My sister-in-laws have been watching the girls while I'm at work, so that's been a real help.  But at night, the other residents head upstairs to tend to their own night time activities and the girls and I stay down in our rooms on the bottom floor.  The girls went to sleep really easy.  I mean super easy.  Like, so easy I should have known something would happen.  I even told Gina when she called that there "hasn't been so much as a peep".  All that new hard wood flooring beneath my feet and I didn't think to knock on it once!  There's still a little work to do on our room, which includes a couple of 60 watt light fixtures referred to as "the night lights", which offer a softer alternative to the florescent lights that fill the room.  I checked on the girls at 8:30 - still passed out - so I tucked them in for the night, closed their door, and scaled the ladder up in to the rafters where the lights needed to be installed.  It's now about 9:30 and I've got one fixture in and was about half way through the second when the silence of the night was broken by an eerie "doo-doo-doo / dun doo-doo-doo / dun-dun doo-doo-dooooo".  For those that aren't experts at Cranium's "humdingers", this is the sound that their princess scooter makes when you push the Cinderella button.  I freeze, listening.  Monitor next to me has been silent.  No other noises follow.  Must have been the cat.  We're good now - I keep working.  A few seconds pass and I hear a soft rumbling noise.  Like someone is moving something across the marble floor.  I figure one of my new co-tenants is trying to do something - you know, when you try to do something quietly and it ends up 1000 times louder.  I hang my head down from the rafters and peek around the corner to see out my door, just as the front end of their Little Tykes car slowly rounds the corner into my room - Arianna driving, Genevieve pushing from the back.  Both of them look up at me like teenagers who've just pulled into the garage (which is ironic that they actually did) 4 hours past their midnight curfew to see dad standing their with a cup of coffee and a scowl.  Needless to say it was a mad dash back to their room and up into their beds again.  It was a race to see if they could get there before I could catch them, because they know that I'm not going to take them out of their beds to give them "da-da's".  Who am I kidding?  These kids know me better than I know me - I'm not the "da-da" giving type, and they call my bluff every time.  But I'm going to need to figure something out, because they've obvioulsy learned some ninja moves to avoid being detected by that monitor. ... and that could lead to trouble.