About fifteen minutes later, as I was cleaning up from dinner and Mama was nursing Thalia, I heard some thumping noises. With three animals in the house, thumping noises of this sort can be attributed to any one of a number of sources, so visual inspections of the pets is usually required. From the table I was clearing I could see our dog Nalia sleeping on the floor, and Tenzing was relaxing near her. That meant Penny, while not being chased, might have jumped down from something. Then I heard another thump. Definitely not Penny, as she only makes one thump when jumping down from a desk upstairs. As I headed to the stairs I checked on Mama and Thalia, still nursing quietly on the couch in the living room. There was no screaming, so I had no idea what Siena might have been up to, but it definitely had to be her.

I started upstairs, and as I reached high enough to be able to see into our bathroom, which is at the top of the stairs, I saw Siena getting down from her step stool at the sink, having just washed her hands. She looked at me and said, “I was having a pee,” and very matter of factly dried off her hands and started walking back to her room.

Bravo, girl! She did heed my advice, in ways I hadn’t intended (isn’t that always the way?), and had decided to use the potty entirely on her own.

The trouble was, she left the water in the sink running (I discovered she had used too much hot water, but it had not yet been hot enough to burn her thankfully), and, more amusingly, when she had put her night shorts back on she had put both legs in the same leg hole. So there she was walking back to her room with one shorts leg really tight around her entire waist, and the other one just flapping loosely on her hip. She was sleepy enough that she had no clue. Laughing, I stopped her and coaxed her out of her shorts and back into them the correct way, and then hustled her back into bed where she stayed until morning.

P.S. It’s not entirely clear she stayed until morning. When she got up this morning, I said, Siena you slept through the night!

She replied, “Yeah, but when I went to see daddy in the night daddy was sleeping so I went back to bed.”

We have no idea if that happened at all or if she dreamed it, but if it’s true, that’s another great step!

So the following picture is not really truly representative of Siena’s relationship with her bed:

That being said, her bed is quite a bit more snuggly than her crib, and we even have the opportunity to snuggle with her. This has resulted in some bad mama and daddy behaviors where we’ll snuggle with her for too long, and now it takes her a while, and several snuggles, to get to sleep at night. Time to break out the Ferber technique…