Last night as Siena was going through her current normal bed-time routine of having one parental unit give her a bath, then the other read books and “put her to bed,” and then the first snuggle or sit with her, and then optionally the second again sit with her, I told her that this was going to have to stop, and she needed to stop calling out to us to come and sit with her. She just needed to go to sleep. As she had succeeded in convincing me to come into her room in the first place to sit with her (which is to say, she had already achieved victory), she easily assented to this demand. I kissed her good night and left, assuming that as usual my exhortations would go unheeded.

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!