Should explain why she doesn’t sleep with us

Leta has taken to her toddler bed far better than we ever imagined she would and has yet to figure out that she can get out of it without asking our permission first. I know this is just dumb luck and that one night I’m going to turn over in bed and touch noses with her chubby disembodied face, and it will scare me enough to kill me, dead, a sudden death, sad and useless since I never got to slurp tequila shots out of Clive Owen’s belly button.

Every night before we turn out our lights and go to sleep one of us will go check on Leta to make sure she’s still covered up and that one of the ten Dora books she is sleeping with hasn’t fallen over and pinned her to the mattress. I’m afraid Leta sleeps exactly like I do, like she is practicing taekwondo, and rarely do we ever walk into her room to find her under her covers or even lying parallel to the bed. She is always crumpled into some impossible position, her knees pressed to her forehead or both elbows locked behind her neck. One constant is her messy hair splashed in every direction, and I always have a hard time determining which side of her head is her face. Sometimes I’ll try to move her hair to make it easier for her to breathe, and I’ll accidentally stick my finger into an ear I did not know was there. Which startles her, oh, a lot. Makes me a little worried that years from now her most vivid memory of her mother will be the one where I walk into her bedroom at night TO STICK MY FINGER IN HER EAR.

Recently she has been wriggling her way out of the bed while sleeping, and more than once I have walked in to find all of her body off the bed except for her head. Like she’s using the mattress as a pillow. I’m always wary of pushing her body around too much because she is a notoriously light sleeper, will wake up if she hears a tree growing, but I didn’t want her to wake up with a crick in her entire body. So I picked her up off the floor and put her back on the mattress. And I’m not even kidding, she woke up and glared at me, made a sort of barking noise, and defiantly put her body back on the floor. I do believe that this is an indication that soon she will have hair growing out of her chin.

Yesterday we changed the sheet on her bed, and when she saw what we had done, WHAT WE HAD DONE! she collapsed on the floor into an angry heap. It was no longer the FLOWER SHEET, THE FLOWER SHEET, THE FLOWER SHEET! I looked at Jon and said that maybe I was going out on a limb here, but if I had to guess I would say that this is no longer the flower sheet, what do you think? Jon looked closely at the pattern and suggested that it was similar enough to flowers, and I had to agree, although I was willing to bet that Leta would not. Just a hunch.

“THOSE ARE NOT FLOWERS!” she screamed. “THOSE ARE LEAVES!

LEAVES!

LEEEEEEAAVES!

LEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAVESSSSSSS!”

Did you know about this? The subtle difference between flowers and leaves? Really? Because I was totally unaware until last night when someone kindly pointed it out to me.