Bedtime
My younger daughter is spending her first night in a Big Girl Bed.
Last night it was like there was a conspiracy to keep me from sleeping. First Cuervo snuck upstairs and started delicately eating kitten food from the bag. Then Maddie decided she was Mad as Hell and Not Going to Take It Anymore from Max, and chased him around the house for a good 30 minutes, slamming into the kids’ bedroom doors along the way. After I chased off the dog and calmed down the cats, I crawled back into bed and had just started to fall back asleep when I heard a couple of moans and a plaintive “Mommmmmmmmy” from the baby monitor. I crossed my fingers that she would just go back to sleep. All was quiet for the next couple of minutes, save a little thump that might have been the Jo hitting the wall as she rolled over.
Then I hear Caroline’s doorknob rattling, and a voice just behind the door saying “Ey! Openna do! Openna do!”. She had vaulted out of her crib and was trying to escape her room. I opened the door as instructed and she declared, “I got outta bed!”. Agreeing as to how she did, I scooped her up and brought her back to sleep in our bed, where she proceeded to wiggle for an hour or so until settling down sometime around dawn.
Today I sat Jo down and had a long talk with her about the bed situation. She has a built-in window-bed-nook in her room, which we planned to use for her bed. A while back she thought she saw a bug in there, and has refused to sleep in her “tall bed” for over a year since. I somehow convinced her not only to try the bed again but to get excited about it, and we moved the other bed from her room into Caroline’s, which had been our plan all along.
And a good thing we did. The other night, one of Caroline’s stuffed animals, appropriately named Kitty, disappeared into thin air within the space of an hour. This was bad. Kitty is necessary for bedtime. We tore the house apart looking for it in all the places the kids had travelled that day, to no avail. When hub moved the bed tonight, we saw Kitty, as well as a stuffed monkey, dog, and rabbit. Apparently Max the Kitten was making a stuffed animal stash for himself.
What a stinkhead.