Bedtime Mischief

The night-time antics of our daughter are frustrating sometimes. She rarely goes to sleep straight away, preferring to play an extended game of “Daddy/Mummy, come here”. On the other hand, there are occassions where she can be very funny. Tonight was one of them.

Ray is almost four years old, and has been without dummy (Americans: read pacifier/soother) for about a year now. She’s currently sharing a room with Jay who only has a dummy when sleeping. Little Ray isn’t stupid. She steals Jay’s dummy on a nightly basis. When she’s not stealing this, she pulls her bed across to the wardrobe (where the secret dummy stash resides), stands on the end of the bed and reaches up to the top.

Tonight was a rare exception. Both kids went to sleep immediately. No messing. No fussing. Brilliant!

So, Mrs Levee comes in, and we chat for a while about some of the cute things the children did today. Feeling all lovey toward them, I popped my head in the door of the room to find my sleeping angels. Except Ray wasn’t asleep. No, she was surveying her hoard of stolen dummies! She’d stolen Jay’s, then taken another two off the wardrobe.

Caught in the act, she bluffed that she had ‘found’ them. Yeah, right. Just happened to stumble across the top of the wardrobe, did we? Anyway, I snapped up the lot, returning one to Jay before leaving the room.

About ten minutes later, she appeared at my door for a ‘hug and a kiss’. Nothing unusual in that. Sometimes she’ll do that before settling down for the night. I was working on the computer when she came in, so I explained that I was working on a website. She pretended to be interested for a minute, then asked to be put back to bed.

I could see from the landing that she’d been busy. After I left the room the first time, she’d pulled the bed over to the wardrobe to get the dummies back. When she discovered they weren’t there, she headed out to the landing (Mrs Levee sometimes keeps dummies there). After a pretty poor harvest, she had finally came to see me!

The beauty of it all is that Jay was sound asleep while all this was happening! The wee man’s always been a sound sleeper, so he almost always misses out on the bedtime antics of little Miss Levee!