Miss has reached the age when she has a very active imagination, combined with the cunning to try and stay up as long as possible this does make for some interesting bedtime conversations;
Yes you can have another wee.
No you can’t have another drink.
Oh really? There’s a lion and a tiger and a spider and a monster in your bed and they’re squashing you, well we’d best deal with them.
So how do you deal with an imaginary menagery of such diversity? Fortunately Miss isn’t scared of this motley assortment of bedfellows so what we do is tell them to get out of her bed and go on the bean bag, then we stroke them and tickle them behind their ears and that sends them straight off to sleep.
If you have less docile creatures living under toddler beds and lurking in wardrobes here are some other ideas to shoo them away and get little ones a restful night’s sleep.
- Capture them in a Nightmare Snatcher – great for older kids to write down worries and ease their monster woes.
- Squirt them with Monster Spray to send them back to Monster land
- Invest in a Monster Mansion to oust the impostors
Well there’s a new one, just as I was finishing this post Miss trundled downstairs and told me that there was a peacock in her bed and it was eating her, fortunately peacocks are easier to deal with than lions and tigers and spiders and monsters, you just have to clap to shoo them off.
Photo credit : Lillylva on sxh.hu
Love it!
As you know Jax I only give the very best parenting advice on this blog.
They might be Maebh’s peacocks. She has 18 of them but they’ve pottered off. The youngest one answers to the name of Pica. Hard to see with the naked eye though …
Ahhh I’ll look out for Pica. Maybe with a magnifying glass in hand.
See ‘A Lion in the Meadow’ by Margaret Mahy.
When I first started babysitting, one of my Dads wrote a sign to hang on his daughter’s door:
No Lions allowed by order of Daddy! It worked like a charm.
Good to know that lions are so law abiding!