It's good to be alive and here

My little lady is on a cycle of waking up at between 3 and 4am, every night. We don't know what causes it so I don't know what to change to fix it.
All I can do is go into her room with my quilt and pillow and lay down beside her and try to encourage her to lie still and go back to sleep.
Ignoring her just leads to an extremely energetic session of bed jumping (note to self: get 3 new slats for bed) and squealing along to Elmo in Grouchland.

Thanks to our recent attic conversion* we rearranged the bedrooms so that Bratski now has the room furthest from everyone else. So I have attempted some control over her behavior as her screaming doesn't have as much power as it did when she was in the box room next to our horrible neighbors.
But there are limits to one's behavioural analysis techniques at 4 o'clock in the morning, and until David Coleman takes up my invitation to sleep over; Going into her room and falling asleep to the sound of Elmo and Huxley, is the "plan".
And yes I do want Huxley to win. I want to throw Elmo from the train by this stage.





As a woman for whom the words 3 and A.M should only ever be uttered in the context of an airport and a very big aeroplane - this has been somewhat trying. But I am getting used to it, and in the morning, once I can make sense of what is real and what was a hallucination/dream, I can get on with the day.

Other than that, The Brat is flying - she not only uses the iPhone to scroll through albums of pecs pictures that I have loaded; she grabbed the phone yesterday to take a photograph of something she had googled on the laptop!
Actually held it up and tried to focus on the little Fimble yoke that she was missing. So she could request it. Kid is a genius. Sure you'd have to get up really early in the morning to outsmart her - wait, that's what we do!

xx

*Wicklow County Council put us through 2 1/2 years of an application process to get a grant to do this attic - which they approved in 2008. We built it to their exact specs at considerable additional cost 6 months ago - and they still haven't paid up.
**st***s