'I woke up to find a text exchange between my kids that left me in tears'

My children's normal bedtime routine goes something like this:

I put them all to bed at 8.30pm, they get 20 minutes of 'device time', then I come in, take their devices out of their rooms and put them on charge before kissing each of my babies and tucking them in. They're usually asleep in minutes.

My children are Philip, 14, Giovanni, 10, and Caterina, nine, and while our bedtime routine is usually easy, lately I've been accidentally falling asleep before they do owing to my early work shifts.

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One morning recently, I woke up without any memory of having tucked them in. When I grabbed my phone to look at the time, I saw multiple unread text messages. 

In a panic I quickly began scrolling through them, and when I was done I was almost in tears.

Here's what had happened while I was sleeping:

After failing to tuck children in owing to my own fatigue, both Philip and I were fast asleep when Giovanni opened up our group chat to tell me he was scared:

When I didn't answer, Caterina (who was also still awake due to my failure to properly parent) answered him:

Then, she drew a dog (though to me it looked more like a cat):

Giovanni then decided to contribute his own artistic offering in a slightly more disturbing way, depicting a man being shot by paint balls:

Closely followed by a drawing of a dog which, as far as I am concerned, looks more like a dog than my daughter's attempt:

Perhaps after that Giovanni was feeling hungry, because he drew a picture of cereal in milk. This one shocked me a bit, because not once in his life has Giovanni EVER eaten cereal with milk on it, although he's happy to eat dry cereal and sip on a cup of milk at the same time.

Go figure.

After the cartoon figure finished his cereal, he clearly needed some exercise, so Giovanni drew him doing cannon balls into a pool:

Closely followed by a running rabbit, which was pretty random:

Then a game ensued with Giovanni drawing a Pokemon and asking his sister to guess which one it was. She failed, as did I:

Then, Caterina wrote her own message about being scared, which Giovanni had been feeling before their text exchange:

Formerly-scared big brother to the rescue! Giovanni writes, "I'm coming."

I assume he tucked her in before tucking himself into bed, because when I woke up they were both fast asleep.

Just when I think I can't love my kids any more than I already do, they go and do something like this.

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