About three weeks ago now we took the plunge. We dismantled the crib, said a little prayer, and put Elyse to bed in Aaron’s old toddler bed. Petrified doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt about the move, but it was something that had to be done. She had turned two on June 1st. By the time that Aaron was two, he had been sleeping in a toddler bed for over seven months. Why did we wait so long? If you have to ask then you probably don’t know this little girl. Maniac describes her on a good day. She has a brain that is constantly churning out new and exciting ways to torture us. She is absolutely fearless and will scale anything given the opportunity. Do we really need to relive the poop story; Versions 1 AND 2?
The thought of her all alone in her room with absolute total freedom to live out whatever scheme she could devise caused my left eye to start twitching involuntarily. I have seen her in action and I know what she is capable of when adult supervision is present and ready to thwart her evil plans. I couldn’t even conceive the damage that could take place when given a ten to twelve hour span of time with no witnesses.
But, these milestones eventually have to take place and so on June 20th, Father’s Day, we took her to Wal Mart to pick out some big girl bedding. That night we read her some stories, sang her some Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, crossed our fingers, and closed the door behind us hoping that when we opened the door the next morning her room would still be standing and intact. It was quiet at first, but then there was a little knock at the door. She knocked for a while and then yelled that she had to use the potty. Ok, we can’t very well deny her potty privileges, so we let her out to pee. She went back to her bed, but then started knocking again. We started this at 8:30 PM. By 9:30 PM she was still knocking. Then things seemed to get quiet. Around 10:30 PM I went in to double check on her before Mike and I went to bed and she was STILL awake, sitting up in the middle of her bed with the biggest bags under her eyes that I have ever seen. When she saw me she said, “I need Twinkle, Twinkle.” So I sang her Twinkle, Twinkle, tucked her back in, and went to bed.
The rest of the night was quiet and when we walked back in the next morning we were relieved to find a happy, rested girl and a completely intact bedroom. After a few more nights of knocking on the door, she got with the program and now she goes to bed without a problem. She has only fallen out of bed a hand full of times and when she does wake up in the morning, she very quietly plays with a couple of toys until we go in to get her. The other morning I walked in and she had her blanket all stretched out on the floor, books all around her, and when she saw me she said, “I read stories, Mommy.”
Still, I am not completely confident that we won’t walk in there one morning to find her constructing a bomb with nothing more than some Desitin, left-over Cheerios, and a baby doll head, but that fear seems to lessen with every successful morning that she is not sitting in a pile of rubble that used to be her room. This was one of the milestones that I dreaded the most with her, but somehow, against all odds, things seem to be going well. My eye has almost completely stopped twitching and I am down to just one handful of Tums a day. Now if you will excuse me, Princess beckons from the baby monitor. Um, wait a second. Did I just hear her say, “Fire in the hole?” Nahhhh.
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