This is nice.

[velvetpage]

Most mornings, I wake up a bit before Piet and Elizabeth and head to the office to check email and lj. It's a few minutes of private time before they have to get up.

Well, the last few mornings, Elizabeth has been getting up twenty minutes or so after me, toddling into the office, and climbing into my lap. There she snuggles contentedly, sometimes going back to sleep, sometimes playing with my hair, sometimes just giving me a few minutes of hug-time before she goes to perform Daddy's wake-up call. "Daddy wha're you doin'? Is Morning! Wake up, daddy!"

It's so sweet.

Now if only she would figure out that despite Mike and Sully and Randall, there are, in fact, no monsters in her closet. She wants me to go to sleep on her floor lately, to keep the monsters away. I rue the day we let her watch Monsters Inc.

Comments

[shavastak.livejournal.com]

Randall's a tough one to deal with, even if you use Susan's poker method. (Susan, from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, knows that monsters exist and confronts them with a poker. She attempts to teach the children under her care not to be afraid of the monsters, but to fight back against them.) His invisibility powers make him tough for a kid to fight.

[stress-kitten.livejournal.com]

When I was little, I remember that there were monsters in my room... my dad made a monster trap for me that involved hanging a cotton reel from a piece of thread so that it hung down into the doorway. He told me that no monsters could get past it.

Of course, the fact that he'd hung it on my BEDROOM door and the monsters were IN my bedroom meant that he'd effectively trapped them in there with me - a fact that at 6 I was completely cognisant of - was besides the point. I then believed that he'd made it impossible for them to leave the room... so I ordered them to run away out the window, which they did.

Sorry... got side-tracked. A "monster trap" might help... and since, if I remember my Monsters Inc trailers correctly, the monsters can get into the backs of closets without coming in through the door, that means that they just can't get into her room.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Good idea. Elizabeth and I will begin work on a monster trap.

[purplkat.livejournal.com]

I've read stories by parents who performed various rituals that banished the monsters. One had an 'anti-monster spray' that they would make a big deal of spraying in the closet and under the bed and then would leave on the nightstand in case the child got scared (it was really just a spray bottle with nothing in it or something of that nature, can't remember what), and another had a 'magic ritual' they performed that sealed the room against monsters.

Might something like that work to help Elizabeth feel better? Maybe something that would give her a sense of power over the monsters?

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking of telling her that Febreze is Monster Removal spray. We spray it in the closet, and the monsters can't come through it. If she wants to spray it every night, that'll work fine for me. :)