Hmm. Her mother thinks it's related to something her daughter saw online, a trailer to a movie or a clip of some sort. Whatever the cause, that doll is still deep inside the bedroom closet and the door remains firmly closed except for when my granddaughter is pulling out a hoodie or a sweater. Until she decides to give it away, I imagine that's going to be the doll's fate.
Fast forward to this past weekend. My older daughter decided to have her niece (yes, that granddaughter) and nephew for an overnight with her own son. So that would be out three grandkids all in the same house with us: two boys, ages 11 and 8, and one little girl, age 6. We've done this before so it's not unknown territory. Our house is a small, three-bedroom ranch, though, so containing all that child energy under this one roof can get to be a mite challenging. Nevertheless, my daughter handled them all heroically, getting them all bathed and changed into their pajamas, and all set for a fun and then restful night.
Except none of them wanted to watch the movie she had selected. And then the battle for sleeping space broke out. The usual battles of who didn't want to share a bed with whom, who got to be in which room, and what time they were all going to sleep, broke out and were finally quelled. In the end, two of them slept in my grandson's room, one of them slept in my daughter's bedroom, and my daughter graciously slept on the couch in the living room. (Jim and I were thankfully uninvolved in any of this.)
You would think that once the children had all fallen asleep, and they eventually did despite the added rush of soda at dinner time, ice cream for dessert, and than some assorted candy just before bath, that the house would be at peace. Not so, according to my daughter.
She told me that she hardly got any sleep at all that night, not because the couch is so uncomfortable (it isn't) or because she wasn't tired (after a day with three active children, she definitely was). She couldn't sleep because the house itself was so restless. It started with a particularly loud noise we sometimes have in the kitchen. It's the noise a freezer makes when the ice maker dumps a load of cubes into the container. Except that we don't have an ice maker.
Then there was all the commotion in the hall. Not only the usual rustlings and steps that are a given in our house. She also talked about the sound of our bedroom door opening. She was awake anyway, so she would wait for one of us to come down the hall and turn in at the bathroom. Except that only happened once, and when it did, and I went into the bathroom, she was outside having a middle-of-the-night/can't-sleep-anyway smoke.
The next morning when she asked about us going in and out of our room during the night I did tell her about my one nocturnal trip. "Oh, that must have been when I was outside," she said. "Because you flipped the outside light off on me, didn't you? And then put them back on when you realized I was on the porch?"
Uh, no, actually, I didn't. I told her that and she asked me two more times about it in hope that I was mistaken. "You're sure? You didn't use mess with the light? Just turn it off for a few seconds, then turn it back on?"
I never made it anywhere near the light switch so I knew it wasn't me.
Well, after all, it IS this house. And my older grandson sees dead people. And my granddaughter dislikes her doll. And though my middle grandchild doesn't say much about it, he has off-handedly made remarks that tell me he has ability in that area, also. Like the time he told his mom that he missed her best friend. Except that his mom's best friend passed away when this child was only one year old.
Gotta love those grandkids and their energy. They enter a house like this one -who knows what gets stirred up?
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