But she still loves it, as evidenced by this video, in which she is shouting “New bed!”

Thalia was getting chilly at night without her sleep sack, which she usually had been removing about five microseconds after we leave her room, and she has even been waking up around 11 or midnight screaming and requiring some snuggling, usually because she’s so cold. Remarkably, Siena has yet to stir during these screaming bouts. We have to keep her room cool because Siena is in her bed all snuggled under her sheet. So we’ve taken the plunge and set her up with a twin sheet foldedr up to fit her crib.

She got very excited about this new arrangement, so much so that she interrupted her last book half-way through in order to go to bed, and when Mama was putting her down, she said, “I like my new sheet.”

Bed time even seemed a little quieter than usual. And we just checked in on her and she’s still under there, snug as a bug. Hooray!

For the past year, maybe longer, up until very recently, Siena has been asking that both parents say goodnight to her. Typically, one of us gives her a bath, and the other then reads books to her, tucks her into bed, and says goodnight. She then asks that second parent to go get the first to say goodnight to her. More often than not, in the past year, Siena has been having Mama read the books and put her into bed, so I’ve been called up as second goodnight shift.

Two years ago, when I said goodnight to Siena I’d usually “snuggle” with her, which means I would climb into bed with her and lie down next to her for a couple of minutes. (Often, when Mama would do this, she’d nearly fall asleep herself!) Eventually, about a year ago, this morphed into “sitting” with Siena, which meant either I sat on the bed or I sat on the floor next to the bed. Siena had gone from asking, “Will you snuggle with me” to “Will you sit with me?” when I walked into her room.

As she approached turning four, we started preparing Siena to have only one parent say goodnight, so that she’d no longer ask for the other after getting into bed. The night before she turned four, when I walked into her room after she asked me to come and say goodnight, I said, “Now remember Siena, you won’t be having us both say goodnight once you turn four tomorrow, right?” and she replied, “Tomorrow you’ll put me to bed, and the night after Mama will put me to bed.” Then the next night on her fourth birthday, she had Mama put her to bed and asked for me to come in after that. I went in and reminded her what we talked about, and that I was only coming in to say goodnight, not to sit with her. To “snuggling” and “sitting” this added the new option of “saying goodnight.” Our conversation typically have gone like this:

Siena: Daddy, will you sit with me?

Daddy: Siena, I’m going to only say goodnight.

Siena: Sit with me for one minute.

Daddy: I’ll sit with you for 30 seconds, ok?

Siena: Ok.

Some nights when I say I’m only going to say goodnight, she says “Ok, just say goodnight.”

A month later, now some nights she asks for me to go in, and some she doesn’t. And some nights she understands that I’m only coming in to say goodnight, though some she still asks me to sit with her.

Tonight, however, was a little different. Today we had our annual pumpkin party, and Siena and Thalia both had a fantastic day. Siena confided to us tonight that she thought it was “the most perfect day I’ve ever had in my life.” (She’s hyperbolic, that one.) Siena was also very tired, having done a tremendous number of things today from painting her pumpkin just after breakfast to running outside with me and some friends this afternoon to helping Mama gut her pumpkin to playing energetically with friend Emma before dinner. Dinner ran late, and it was a quarter to nine before Siena finally got down for bed. I went and picked up dinner with Thalia and then put her to bath and bed afterward, while Mama gave Siena bath and put her to bed. Even though Siena didn’t ask for me to come in and say goodnight, I felt like I hadn’t seen her all evening since she didn’t even come and say goodnight to me before reading her books as she often does.

So I walked into her room, and here is how the backwards conversation went:

Siena: “I didn’t want you to come in tonight.”

Daddy: “Siena, I wanted to come and sit with you since I didn’t see you all evening.”

Siena: “Only say goodnight.”

Daddy: “Can I sit with you for one minute?”

Siena: “Ok, but only for one minute because I’m really super tired.”

Is she learning the degree of power she wields over me? Too soon!

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…