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June 3, 2007

By Tiffany Harvath

I discovered one on the floor beside my bed when I woke up last weekend.

Upon going downstairs, I discovered two more on the couch. Well, actually only one was on it and the other was underneath it.

There were six in the middle of the living room, forming an odd star with their bodies all spread outward and their heads together.

Upon counting I realized one was missing. But then I discovered her on the floor of the playroom.

All of them were sleeping happily and some were gently snoring. They were all completely and blissfully unaware of the three-year old blonde and blue eyed loudspeaker that was currently amongst them.

He had woken up at 7:30a.m. They had fallen asleep at around 5:30a.m.

Some people are still asking me in bewilderment why I offered to host a lock-in for the teenagers in my Sunday senior high school class at my house. Others want to know if I plan to bill the church for what they assume must be an expensive psychiatric visit. A small number want to know if I was secretly brainwashed.

The truth of the matter was that when the school year ended I decided that all the high school students I had taught on Sunday mornings might enjoy a night together supervised by an almost-preschooler, a 13-month old toddling infant and myself.

We are in preparations for our mission trip this summer and I wanted to get the group together for some planning about what we were doing and how we were going to do it.

The truth of the matter is that there is also not much conversation with babies. With my husband deployed, I truly relished the chance to have a noisy house of exuberant kids. I fed off their energy and their laughter and their enthusiasm. I loved having people in my house that I could talk to and who would at least pretend to think my jokes were amusing.

I think I might have had more fun than they did.

I learned several things at this lock-in.

I learned that a teenager can hear a two-pound bag of M&Ms being opened from three rooms away.

I learned that glitter and three-year olds are not a good combination.

I learned that teenagers can stay awake for 20 hours straight on a diet consisting of Doritos, Cheetos and microwave popcorn.

I learned that a local pizza shop gives sympathy discounts on large pizza orders placed by seemingly sane adults hosting lock-ins for a dozen teenagers.

I learned that cold pizza is the breakfast of choice for said teenagers. And, as it turned out, for three-year old boys.

I learned that teenagers do not appreciate alarm clocks that walk and talk loudly, weigh about 40 pounds and pry their eyelids open when they are sleeping to ask if they are awake.

Finally, I learned that sometimes a houseful of laughing teenagers who are teasing each other, small children, the cats and engage in crafting activities for a float for Colony Days are sometimes the most fun one can have all year.

Most nights, after the kids are in bed, I catch up on email and maybe read a chapter or two then go to sleep a lonely bed in a house that sometimes seems to overwhelm me with silence. I usually lay awake for a while, imagining what my husband might be doing at that exact moment and praying that he is safe.

Last weekend I barely remember stumbling into my bed, let alone actually falling asleep. There were laugh lines still on my cheeks and forehead the next morning and my stomach ached from a combination of junk food and giggling. There was gold glitter in my hair and red magic marker on my fingernails.

When I looked at myself in the mirror that morning before I fetched my loudly complaining son from his room and my cooing daughter from hers, I saw someone who had simply enjoyed the moment the evening before. I saw someone who had forgotten her worries for a night and just enjoyed being around a large, noisy group of people.

And, heaven help me, I saw someone who is already contemplating another lock-in at the end of summer to commemorate the start of school.

Tiffany Horvath is the mother of two and the stepmother of one. Her husband, Drew, is deployed to Iraq. She writes every Sunday abut life at home for the wife of a deployed soldier.