BRING ME A DREAM

It seems like there's one phrase that really was coined purely to describe me; "I don't do mornings." It's an important lesson that everyone close to me has to learn at some point. My personality doesn't arrive until at least two hours after I've dragged myself out of bed, which is a feat I'll put off for as long as I possibly can. Charlotte had spoiled me in that respect. Since she began sleeping through the night (which took an inordinate amount of time) she slept like clockwork from 7pm until 7am every single night. It was magical. She'd wake me up, happily chatting to herself in her crib, and we'd start our morning ritual of oats and yogurt- Charlotte munching away, happy as a clam; me, slowly adjusting to wakefulness and trying to open my eyes all of the way.

Some mornings the happy chatting isn't enough to wake me from sleep. Some mornings I'm really totally oblivious. One of these mornings was a couple of months ago. I vaguely remembered Ryan kissing me goodbye as he left for school, or at least I thought I did. But then I heard a door open so I thought I must of been dreaming. Charlotte was in her crib so it couldn't possibly be her who opened it. My eyes remained firmly closed, determined to hang on to sleep. But then I heard the door close and, since the 'Charlotte's Room' plaque rattled I had the bleary thought that her bedroom door was the one in question. Why was Ryan going into Charlotte's room? Drunk with sleep, I couldn't begin to fathom what Ryan could possibly be doing in there.

And then, "I did it Mummy!" the spritely voice of my two year old.

I rolled over, peeking over the covers. Charlotte was standing in the doorway sporting an enourmous, excited grin. It occurred to me that seeing her there was pretty weird since she couldn't get out of her crib by herself, but since I wasn't awake enough to string two thoughts together my eyes simply closed.

"Mummy, I did it!"

Suddenly I was wide awake. What on earth? Charlotte was standing in the doorway, and Ryan was on his way to school. How did she get there?!

"Charlotte, what did you do? Can you show me?"

She took me by the hand and lead me to her room. I put her back in her cot and asked her if she'd climbed out by herself. She simply said, "I do it again!" and proceeded to climb immediately out, with amazing speed really, considering it was only the second time she'd ever done it.

And so it was, we came to the conclusion that it was time to move our baby girl (in my head at least) into the dreaded big girl bed. I'd heard the horror stories. I saw the clock work schedule disappearing along with the crib rails. With worries of finding her playing with her toys in the middle of the night, or asleep in random areas of the house, or even the possibility that she just wouldn't sleep at all, we braced ourselves for what we were sure would be a nightmare.

It turned out that it wasn't quite the disaster we were expecting. We set up the bed and Charlotte was very excited about what she considered to be a new toy. She'd climb in it to read. She'd climb under the quilt and pretend to take a nap, fake snoring and all. She'd put her dolls to sleep and tuck them in. But, since we had the bright idea of leaving the crib up for a couple of nights, her bottom lip would start to tremble the moment we tried to actually put her to bed in it. 

We waited for a friday night before we took the crib apart and officially bumped her up to the new bed. We figured that way, if nobody got any sleep, at least Ryan wasn't going to school dog tired. We went through her usual bed time routine and, finally, we gingerly turned off the light and closed her door. Ryan and I went and sat in the loft and just waited. We were sure that within minutes we'd hear her door open and we'd find our little monkey sneaking back out to play. We waited, and waited, until we forgot that we were waiting and an hour later it dawned on us that she hadn't made a sound. She hadn't cried, or stealthily made her way out of bed; we hadn't heard a peep. In amazement, I opened her door to make sure everything was ok. Here was my view:

She looked as though she'd fallen asleep the moment the lights were turned off; since we hadn't heard a single sound from her, maybe she had! We certainly didn't expect a repeat performance the next night, but three months later with a 7 o clock bedtime still in tact I think it's fair to say this girl likes to sleep just as much as her Mum. The only trouble is- she likes the waking up part too...and early! So whether I want to do mornings or not, with this one arriving at my bedside at the crack of dawn, it turns out that I have to!