Sweet Dreams

I'm a litlte groggy today, mainly due to a very sweet incident with Leah last night.

I awoke in the middle of the night to hearing the girls' door open and Leah shuffling in to our bedroom. She said "Mommy, I having bad dreams, I need to sleep in your bed."

Knowing it would be a mistake to let her stay the night in our room, I begrudingly told her to hop in the bed. Scott and I talked to her and asked what the problem was. She repeated again that she had bad dreams, though she couldn't say what they were about.

It would have been easy to just scoot over and let her stay the night cuddled in our not-big-enough-bed, but we were terrified that she'd start to think it was OK to sleep in our bed every night. Instead we reminded her about thinking "happy" thoughts before falling alseep and asked her what some of those might be.

She answered without hesitation "Princesses! Picking flowers! Swinging!"

My heart swelled that she knew so quickly what thoughts would make her happy.

At one point we tried negotiating by telling her she needed to go back to her room since her sister would miss her. Leah didn't miss a beat and said "Sissy will be fine without me."

Once we went through a few more happy thoughts she agreed to go back to bed.

An hour later, the exercise repeated itself, this time I was too tired to argue and she simply crawled next to me and went to sleep. The only reason we noticed is by this point Sydney was up as well, yelling about her "special blankie". Again, we transferred Leah back to her her bed while settling Sydney down.

When the alarm went off just a few hours later we were both totally out of it. It took me forever to get out the door this morning, I felt like we had a night with twin babies all over again.

But their needs are no longer as simple as putting a pacifier in their mouth and turning the music box on. I just hope that we can always remind them of their happy thoughts (and that they take a nap today!)