It's an animal...guess what?

My ten year old has a difficult time sleeping and the consequences of his losing sleep are too much for any of us to bear, so we have reinstated a 30 minute reading time before bed each night. The idea is that he will calm down and be in a better state to hit the hay.

Currently, my wife is reading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Two Towers. Last night she finished a great chapter in which two Hobits tell of how the Ents defeated the evil and traitorous wizard, Saruman.

Because my wife is great at reading out loud, I make a point of lying down in the living room and listening when she reads. One benefit of my interest in this activity is that it helps bolster the atmosphere of calming down. When both Mom and Dad glare at disruptive kids and say quiet or shhhh, the ambiance tends towards being quiet and kids tend to listen.

Because all of our kids seem to have some form of ADHD, we allow them to use dry erase boards for doodling but we disallow playing with toys or with each other during reading.

So directly after last night's riveting tale, my ten year old stands and with a goofy but sweet grin and asks my wife to guess what he's sketched on his white board.

She says, a cat, he says no, grins, and say but it is an animal...she says Xavier (our dog) and he says nope. She says a duck and he says no, keep guessing, to which she responds I'm all through guessing. He says no you're not and she rolls her eyes and says that she is indeed done guessing, that it's his bed time.

He says with a bigger goofier smile, its a bunny rabbit and shows her this: