Why we were drinking hot chocolate at 3 am

All the neighbors' dogs were barking along with ours when I got up at 2:30 to feed A'Isha, our latest foster baby (girl), now six weeks old. It's not too unusual to have a temporary pandemonium like that, since any one dog barking sets off the others, and the guards walking around at night often start our dog Dusty on a howling spell. But as I picked up A'Isha from the drawer where she slept in the living room, I heard a tapping on our gate.

Now, no one should be coming to our gate in the middle of the night. So I quickly followed our protocol by turning off the lights and making sure our doors were locked. I thought it was probably not an intruder so I didn't go as far as to turn on the compound alarm, but I was a bit jumpy. I took the baby to Barb then got my cell phone as the handiest light, and listened as the tapping continued and got louder and a car honked outside our fence. Still no one identified himself.

Well, it turned out that it was just the hospital driver trying to rouse one of the hospital residents. Maybe she was not home, perhaps already at the hospital. Luke thinks the driver was actually banging on her door, not our gate.

Anyway, the result was that all four of us were up in the middle of the night. I sat down at the table to cool down while Barb fed the baby, and Luke came out to join us. Not to miss a chance for "family fun," he said, "Why don't we have hot chocolate?" We did, or Luke and I did, and what started out as another stressful incident ended up being one of those build-a-memory family fun times.