Baby Dreams

I mentioned in my return-from-vacation post that our youngest seems to have a whole lot of fun in her sleep, to the point of laughing out loud at the funny parts of her dreams. She also seems to be getting better at remembering the action for later retelling.

Our usual routine is to roust her about 5:30 a.m. and drag her like a sack of wet cement to the pot so she doesn’t wet the bed. She is semi-conscious during this ordeal, which makes for some interesting conversation and hygiene; then she either stumbles back to her bed, or she stumbles back to her bed, gets four pillows, a Barbie, a shoe, Blankie, Other Blankie, and heads for our bed to snuggle with Mom as Dad gets dressed. After about an hour, I start re-waking her to get her dressed. Most mornings, this is like trying to put clothes on a dead giraffe—lots of dead weight and big floppy appendages.

Yesterday, I raised her to the upright seating position and she giggled a bit. “You got that bad old witch.” I tickled her a bit and finally got her awake enough so that she could tell me what was going on. “There was this witch and she was REAL mean and she was bad and you gots your cannon and you shot it off BOOOM and you blew that old witch up and I wasn’t scared.”

“Even of the cannon?”

Sleepy giggle—“No! You was there and you gots her!”

Well, that’s good…I guess. What an intriguing experience that must have been, though, to see ol’ Dad doing battle with the forces of evil. And comforting, too, in that the only cannon she’s ever seen me around is our reenacting group’s smoothbore three-pounder, which seems decidedly low-tech for such work, yet is apparently of sufficient power to defeat black magic. Musta been using canister and grape.

Of course, the downside is that this is an awfully violent image for Little Girl to be dreaming about. I felt better this morning, though, when we repeated the arise-tinkle-snuggle-wrestle sequence and this time she blearily said, “My toes!”

“What about your toeses?”

Sleepy giggle—“Grandmama, she painted thems with her polishes, and she colored on my fingernails, too! Of course, they was red.”

Well, of course.
posted by Terry at 3:05:00 PM