I don't like you much either, truth to tell...
We've been dealing with a Dessa sponsored nap strike at our house lately. While she sleeps just nifty-keen at Nana's, she has decided that her room Chez Nous is a veritable playground ripe for joyous madcap adventuring. Fact is, she's pretty accurate in her summation, as her bed looks more like the plush animal section of FAO Schwartz than a sleeping platform most of the time.
She's graduated from Dee-Dah (her sheep hand puppet) and a book to greater things. I don't exactly know how it happened, but along with her (two!) baby blankets, comforter and a pillow, Dessa is usually joined in bed by the following cadre of "friends":
- a Tinkerbell pillow and matching blanket (shout out to Jeannie - she lurves it!)
- Mickey Mouse
- Minnie Mouse
- a blue and white stuffed soccer ball from IKEA
- Dee-Dah the sheep puppet
- her baby doll "Baby"
- a yellow rubber duckie
and her most recent addition, an enormous stuffed hippo that's at least 2 feet tall (shout out to the fam in Oregon!). His name is George, after one of Dessa's favorite book-based hippo couples "George and Martha".
This makes, as you can imagine, for a rather crowded bed situation.
I actually have absolutely no problem with her friends being in bed with her. When I was a kid I was mostly restricted to one or two bedtime companions and it never made sense to me. Who cares how many stuffed animals I packed in there as long as I slept? And Dessa generally does sleep just fine, so the ongoing addition of companions doesn't cause me any alarm. Plus, it gives me a bargaining chip when she's being naughty. As in:
"Do I need to come in there and take your friends?"
"No!"
"Then be quiet and go to sleep!"
Long, thoughtful pause...
"OK!"
But sometimes even that backfires and the conversation goes more like this:
"Do I need to come in there and take your friends?"
Long, thoughtful pause...
"OK!"
And then I go into Dessa's room and she, in a display of pique I thought I would get to see only at 13 years of age, is flinging her friends to the ground in an attempt to assist me in evacuating them from her presence.
She's so helpful.
Sometimes the conversations go on a bit longer because I want to argue (after spending the day with 8th graders, of course I want to argue with a two and a half year old! Why do you ask?). I firmly and resolutely repeat the refrain "Dessa, go to sleep!" and she offers her rationales as to why that's not in her best interest:
"But I don't want to go to sleep!" (this piteously whined, "But I don't waaaaaant to go to sleep!" as in "I don't waaaaaant my fingernails pulled out!")
or the ever popular:
"It's NOT nigh-night time!" (this is generally popular when it is so far past nigh-night time that the next bedtime is visible on the horizon)
or a personal favorite of mine, "No! No! No!" It's simplicity is it's beauty, you see.
The other night she hit a real whopper of a fit, though, and busted out with the manipulation. After using all her tried and true favorites, after pulling out what Dave and I call "the fakey cry" (the whiny one with no tears) and being told in no uncertain terms to "Be quiet and go nigh-night!" she yelled with all her might the one thing that she thought would bring down all the walls of Jericho at her feet, the only pronouncement guaranteed to bring her parents running to her side:
"I DON'T LOVE YOU!!!!"
Was it wrong that Dave and I were laughing too hard to mount the stairs?
Posted by GoddessKristin on 01/22/10 at 09:20 AM [link] [No Comments - Be the first!]
