She escapes!

Not since the broken foot episode of ’06 has a single development had a more catastrophic effect on the quality of life in our home.

My friends, Nora has learned how to climb out of her crib.

I know, I know. It’s a shocking turn of events. I had planned for Nora to sleep in her crib until at least her 16th year. (And then we were going to send her off to the convent). But clearly she has a mind of her own. The first time it happened, I was in total denial. Nora had been in her room for a couple of hours, taking a nap. Suddenly, there she was in the hallway. She must have been teleported, I said to myself. Or maybe I just forgot to pull up the railing. Or Gabie let her out. There’s no way she could have climbed out on her own. I am just not ready for that.

Then came Saturday (hereafter known as black Saturday) when I realized that my daughter had in fact not learned to aparate from room to room, she had merely learned to hug the corner of the crib and swing her legs over the railing to freedom. She had also picked up the useful skill of turning a doorknob and opening her door. (Who taught her to do this?!! Has she been sneaking out at night to attend secret Baby Club meetings? What other tricks does she have up her fuzzy-pink-polyester-sleeper sleeve?).

When I put her down for her nap on Sunday (hoping against hope that she had forgotten everything since the day before—hey I can dream, can’t I?) she stayed in her crib for about 10 seconds after I closed the door. Then I could hear her clunking around and jabbering from another part of the room. Sighing, I figured I’d get her out and try lying down with her in my bed. I opened the door and saw, of course, an empty crib. But the rest of the room was empty too. I began to panic as I scanned the closet and under Gabie’s bed. Where did she go? Maybe she did have a teleporter. Then she started to giggle and I saw a shadow behind the blinds. She had climbed onto the window sill, between the closed blinds and the glass, and was standing there like an actor waiting for the curtain to rise before her big show.

Sleeping Beauty by Maxfield Parrish

Now that I have seen her escape with my own eyes, I have graduated from denial into a stage of total despair. Will she ever go to sleep before midnight again? Are her naps—oh, her naps, her lovely, lovely naps, her glorious 3-hour naps, her naps that happily overlapped with Gabie’s TV time, the only time all day when I could get anything done—are they gone forever? I look back nostalgically at the pleasant, week-old memories of a peacefully sleeping daughter and I wave at them as they recede—too soon! it’s much too soon—into the distance.

We put up the bunk bed on Monday night. Gabie sleeps in the top and Nora (theoretically) will sleep in the bottom bed. She hasn’t yet, but at least that’s our plan. Nora’s plan is to avoid sleep entirely. Suddenly, I can’t remember how I ever got the other three kids to go to sleep in a real bed. They all sleep in real beds now, so apparently they somewhere, somehow made the transition, but how on earth did they do it?

I think the other kids were much older when they realized that they could scale their wooden prison bars. I swear Ethan was nearly three and even then, we only set up a new bed for him because I was pregnant with McKay. By that age, I could reason with him and offer him incentives to stay in bed and convince him that big boys slept in big beds. Nora is only 20 months old. She is tall for her age and precocious in the climbing department (yes Mother I see the poetic irony here) but she is not to be reasoned with. I can tell her that she needs to stay in bed and she just looks at me with her soft blue eyes and plays dumb. Stay? she says, smiling. I’m sure I don’t know the meaning of that word. Now excuse me, I have better things to do than sit here while you rub my back and sing to me and try desperately to convince me that I’m tired when anyone could tell that I have at least 2 hours of full energy power left. Goodbye you foolish woman.