Neighborhood Watch....Yep, I'm watching, and so is the dog.

The dog sleeps in our kitchen in her kennel right up against the patio window. She sees everything. Sometimes I wonder if she actually even sleeps during the night or just spends the entire time looking out the window, surveying the goings on in the neighborhood. I know that she must sleep at least some of the time because every once in a while I can hear hear across the house having a puppy dream as she whimpers or half barks at the squirrels that she is probably dreaming about. But occasionally Osa will bust out in a full warning bark. Of course I am always startled by it and then nervously check to see what she's fussing about. Most of the time she's alerted to some deer or a raccoon or some such critter, but once in a while she's telling us there's something else going on. Last night was one of the nights that Osa warned us there was something unusual going on outside. I was having trouble going to sleep and was laying in bed when I heard her start with a low growl before she erupted into a barking frenzy. I hopped out of bed and hurried to the kitchen window to see what was the matter. As I peered out the window I saw three young men using their cell phones as flashlights clambering through a small space between our yard and the neighbor's yard. Osa was going nuts-o with the barking and of course woke Benjamin up from his slumber. Then he exploded into tears. So now the dog was barking incessantly, the baby was screaming and three strangers were tearing through the yard in the middle of the night. I didn't really think about what I was going to do. I just suddenly turned on the flood light in the backyard, opened the patio door and hollered at the young men. "Hey, this is private property and you just woke my baby!" My voice was hoarse from the cold that I had so I sounded extra tough and the light startled them quite a bit. Between my gruff yelling, the dog's barking and the surprise of the back light I probably scared those boys more than they scared me. The way I sounded they probably pictured some crazy, wild-haired woman with a shotgun propped upon her shoulder and a Dirty Harry attitude tucked into her back pocket. Admittedly, that's about how I felt. You may get by with sneaking through my neighborhood, sending the dog into a barking fit and forcing me to get out of bed in the middle of the night. But you gonna wake up my baby? Go ahead, make my day.

Once the household settled down again and we were all back to bed, Jeff and I laughed at my tough girl episode. I'm still not sure what got into me. We live in a Neighborhood Watch area. We're supposed to report suspicious persons, not open the door and "talk" to them. Thankfully I am so frightening that I scared them off. But self-control. There's always room for self-control.