The One Where I lock my kid in a closet.

The night before last, Cherry and I spent the night in Victoria at my friend G.C.'s house. She has this cute little apartment that she somehow got an AWESOME deal on. But "little" happens to be the key word here. She swears she told me that it was a bachelor suite, but somehow I had forgotten. Not that me remembering this detail would have changed anything, anyhow.

The reason why this turned out to be a problem is that Cherry goes to bed every night at 7pm. She goes to bed in a somewhat dark room with a closed door. There was no such room at G.C.'s home.

But there was a closet.

And by closet, I mean, a room with no windows, but is really half the size of Cherry's old bedroom.

I figured that, if I set a fan up to blow cool air into the closet and if I left the door open a tiny bit, and that if G.C. didn't call child services, that the closet would be the perfect place to stick my kid in her playpen. This plan worked for about 20 minutes, when my child realized that perhaps being locked in a playpen within a closet was equal to having her little buddy steal her popsicle from her on a hot day. (i.e. not good)

She started crying. Not fussing, but seriously crying. And since I HAD LOCKED MY KID IN A CLOSET, I figured that perhaps she had reason to be crying, so I took her and her playpen out of the closet and set her up in the main living area, where she shouted, giggled, and talked through ALL of Pride and Prejudice. At one point she was giggling so maniacally, that we couldn't help but giggle along, even though we were trying our hardest to ignore her so that she'd possibly go to sleep.

Part way through the movie, I started farting. Eating hundreds of salty green nuts will do that to a girl. But the farts seemed to stink MUCH more than they should have. In fact, there was even stink when I hadn't farted. At first, I just figured that G.C. was having the same reaction to the nuts that I was, but then I figured it out. The maniacal laughter coming from my little one had nothing to do with Keira Knightley's lack of cleavage*. She had pooped herself. And she was proud of it!

After cleaning Cherry up, I thought that perhaps she'd be ready to go to sleep. It was, after all, already a couple of hours past her bedtime. No such luck. She stayed up for the whole movie, and even a bit beyond. I don't think she fully fell asleep until after all the lights were out and it was around midnight. She went to sleep FIVE HOURS past her bedtime. And she woke up at 6am. An hour before her regular wake up time. Mommy was not impressed. G.C. was even less impressed. She had class to go to!

The plan was that we would leave G.C.'s house when she did, in order to get an early start for the drive home. Due to lack of sleep, and the crazy heat, I just didn't feel like I was in any condition for driving (although I would have done it if I HAD to), and G.C. so nicely let us nap in her house while she went to class.

Cherry's usual 2-3 hour nap lasted for a whole hour.

ERRRG!

I really should have just kept her in that closet!

***

Cherry then didn't sleep on the ride home, even though I tried to time the drive to coincide with her second nap time.

An hour after I got home, I put her down for a nap, and she passed out right away. Around 5pm, I had to wake her up in order to feed her and to get her to go back to bed for her regular 7pm. This worked out well, although it was VERY hard to get her to wake up!
I must be completely heartless to wake up something so cute! She's just like her mom though, I woke her up and presented her with food right away, and she didn't even let out a peep! (That's the only sane way to wake me up! Armondo learned that the hard way, but he learned quickly!)


After sleeping through the whole night, and having a three and a half hour nap today, I think she's we've caught up on sleep!


*I don't say this to be mean, she's really a quite beautiful woman, I only say this because her cleavage was PAINTED ON for "Pirates!"