In Which I Cry With Relief

We've commandeered Lily's crib. Anna needs it. She's outgrown the Moses basket already and she keeps me awake at night with all her grunting and weird noises. Lily is now in the toddler bed; a scary notion to her father and me.

Let me tell you a bit about Lily.

Every kid eats strange stuff. Things an adult would never think to put in their mouths, children taste, put in their mouths or eat. We've had a few problems with this in the past. Ella ate a couple of things we called Poison Control over but we've been pretty darn hardened to what kids eat since then. Until Lily. Lily challenges our sanity with the fear that she will some day kill herself by eating something poisonous or drowning in the toilet. She has an irrational fascination with the toilet and we've found her MANY times playing in the toilet water. Gross. We've also caught her eating things like paint, when we had the house painted, Head and Shoulders shampoo, nails, thumb tacks, dirt (of course), and she does things like: when it rains here the back sliding door tracks fill with water. They are dirty, hard-to-keep-clean tracks and, of course, oiled so that the doors slide smoothly. Lily gets down on all fours and laps the rain water out of the tracks. There is nothing Lily won't put in her mouth.

You can see our fear with putting her in a bed she can get out of. The crib kept her alive while we all slept because she couldn't get out of it...although she did try very hard to get out of the crib, but the climbing is another post entirely. So, we got a gate for her door. I really didn't want to have to do this, but she simply cannot be trusted. It's been a battle to get her to obey us and stay in the bed. The gate just gives us peace of mind that if, in the middle of the night she disobeys, at least she won't eat poison or drown in the toilet.

Last night, Rachel got up and came to our room and then immediately went back to her room. Odd for her; she usually climbs into bed with us. Then I hear the gate opening and closing and feet and more feet and frantic feet and more gate noise. So I drag my tired self out of bed and confront Ella with, "What in the world is going on here???" It was then that panic ensued as Ella informed me that Lily was not in her bed.

We searched the entire house. All the bathrooms, every single room we searched. All the lights were on in the house and Del , Ella and I were calling her name. Can you imagine what was going through our heads??? All the doors were locked so she didn't get out of the house. Why wasn't she answering our calls? And then Del had an epiphany. What's that we see there?

Is that a little butt sticking up in the air?

Let's shed a little more light on the matter.

There she is. Sleeping under Ella's bed.

These aren't the best pictures because I was crying while I was taking them.

And then I hugged her and kissed her and hugged all the kids and kissed them all and thanked God that they were all still safe in their beds.