Although Sidney is slowly transitioning from a crib to a bed, the shift is not yet fully complete. Still, the repercussions are being felt by all of us. I used to have the three girls in one room. But now, Sidney has moved in to the bottom bunk that Fiona used to occupy, Fiona moved to the top bunk, and Francie has moved into what used to be the office. She is now the only person in the family to have her own room. I don’t think she loves sleeping alone, but she does like keeping her stuff away from her younger sisters. (She has boxes of treasures: dessicated lollipops from birthday parties she attended years ago, balls of tangled string, random shiny things she’s found around the house. I swear she is part squirrel.) And M and I no longer have an office. The diminution of adult space in my house is a topic for another today, and is rather thesis worthy in its depth and scope… which just means I can’t get my head around it now.
It also means that Sidney is free to roam. In particular, she’s free to roam and mess with Fiona’s treasure stash. Over the weekend I was up before the kids. I was reading the paper on the couch when Fiona walked out of her room. When my kids wake up they do not lie or loll about in bed. The second their eyes open, the bolt out of bed as if something is chasing them. So she was still half asleep and quite wobbly. I immediately noticed a large bulge in the front of her pull-up.
Holy shit, I thought. All this talk of penises and she’s finally gone and grown one. It’s like a Grimm tale gone very, very wrong.
“Um, Fi.” I said nervously. “Can you tell me what’s in your pull-up?” She hazily looked at me, looked down, and then stuck her hands down the front.
“Oh,” she said. “It’s just gum.” And she plucked out a couple of packs of gum she’d been hoarding. “I wanted to make sure Sidney didn’t get it.”
So, to be clear: in order to keep her (stale) gum stash safe from her two year old sister, she slept with it in her pull-up.
This got me thinking. Perhaps I should follow Fiona’s lead. There are certainly a few things in the house I don’t want to the kids to see. Now that they are all free to roam, and now that my “personal space” has been relegated to a desk in the hall outside of my bedroom, and a small corner of Francie’s bedroom, maybe I ought to gather those items and sleep with them shoved down my underwear.
It’s certainly a thought.