Angel of the morning? HA!

J awoke out of sorts. I mean, really out of sorts. He cried. I mean, really cried.

J: I want my hearts!
H: What hearts?
J: The red ones!
H: What red ones?
J: The hearts I had in bed!
H: Hearts you had in bed?
J: My hearts! I want my hearts!

This continued for quite some time. J has many toys that he loves. Some he takes to bed with him. His favourite toys are round and egg-shaped. He has a preference for green items, though he is starting to really like red too. But he has no heart-shaped toys, and we had no idea to what he referred.

H: Where did you get them?
J: From the litter box!
H: J, you're not allowed near the litter box.
J: No. I didn't touch the pee or poop.
H: There are no hearts in the litter box.
J: Yes there are!

H tried in vain to placate J, who continued to shriek about his missing hearts.

H: What do they look like, J?
J: They're red hearts!
H: How many hearts were there?
J: Two! A big one and a little one!
H: How big are they?
J: One's big! And one's little!
H: What are they made of?
J: My hearts! My hearts! I WANT MY HEARTS!!

H searched for J's hearts. Hunting high and low. He even went out into our front yard and rooted around in J's sand table in search of the missing hearts. In the freezing cold. In his pajamas. At one point, he thought he'd found a red heart-shaped toy out there. But the sobbing J insisted that it was not the right one and just screamed louder.

J: My hearts! My hearts!
H: Are they squishy, like gummy candies?
J: No! They're ... they're ...
H: What are they made of, J?
J: They're made of wood!

And through the entire search process, I lay still, nursing N back into a peaceful slumber, and periodically stating what I thought was the very obvious. That the hearts do not actually exist. That J had a vivid dream which he now believes to be real. That we cannot magically bring toys out of J's dream world and into this one. Of this, I am quite certain. And so, I stupidly attempted to reason with my 3-year old while H unwittingly validated his preposterous claims. I reasoned thusly:

You're not allowed near the litter box.

And if you were allowed near the litter box, you certainly would not be permitted to sift through it.

And if you did sift through it, you would not find little red wooden hearts in the dirty cat litter.

And if you did find little red wooden hearts in there, Mommy and Daddy would have thrown them out, because they would be icky and disgusting.

And if Mommy and Daddy had actually lost their minds enough to allow you to keep the little red wooden hearts that you had found in the dirty cat litter, they still wouldn't have let you sleep with them, because we do not sleep with hard wooden toys!

All perfectly logical, I thought. But an over-tired tantrum-throwing 3-year old is not perfectly logical, nor even remotely logical, and he could not be made to believe that his beloved little red wooden hearts existed only in his subconscious. Obviously, the hearts are real. Obviously, H is just not looking hard enough. Obviously, we are horrid, cruel parents who intentionally steal and hide our 3-year old's toys just to make him cry. We laugh about it later, while we sit together and play with the toys as he cries himself to sleep. What parent doesn't do this? You've done it. We all have. You know it's true.

Eventually, H had to admit that I was probably right. The hearts were fictitious. The morning activities resumed, around the shrieking J.

J: My hearts! My hearts!
H: Do you want to go potty?
J: No! No potty! My hearts! I want my hearts!
H: There are no hearts. Now go potty.
J: MY HEARTS!!!!!

J refused to go potty. Refused to get dressed. Refused to stop screaming. And eventually, ran over to me, grabbed baby N in a death grip, and sang a new song. If you consider his high-pitched shrieks of rage to be "singing". Which I do not.

J: I want my baby!
T: You have your baby. He's right here.
J: My baby! My baby!!
H: J, you're holding the baby.
J: I WANT MY BAAAAABBBBYYY!!!

Eventually J, clothed and nearly in his right mind, was escorted off to preschool. He had refused to go potty before leaving the house, insisting "I want to hold my pee pee in my penis for preschool". What an odd request!

And so he left, wearing a pull-up, just in case he had an accident on the way to school. Which he didn't. But once inside and at the potty, he did overshoot the toilet and get pee on the floor, on the underwear he was about to be changed into and, perhaps worst of all ... on Panda, his faithful companion who he can obviously no longer have for today's naptime. That oughta be fun for someone to deal with.

But not me!

I love spending time with my son. But today, I am relieved that his teachers get to handle him. 'Cause ... damn!

These dreams

My drug-addled brain cannot cope. Passed out in the late part of the morning, I had a dream. It switched fluidly from topic to topic. But I cannot understand how that worked. It was incredibly odd.

**********

I was in my house. But my upstairs main bathroom was about ten times its actual size. And it was a combination bathroom/laundry room. The cats had been locked in this room with their litterbox and water dish. H and I were getting ready to go out. H told me that N's carseat was up in that bathroom. I walked up the stairs and opened the door to find the cats playing on the washer/dryer and N's carseat in a far corner. Every available surface was covered with dirty cat litter. And that is when it occurred to me that I was not wearing my leg brace or carrying my crutches, and had made it all the way up the stairs without my broken knee bothering me. Instead of rejoicing, I decided I'd best hide this from H so that he wouldn't get mad at me for putting full weight on the broken leg when I was prohibited from doing so. I grabbed the carseat, closed the door, and scooted down the stairs on my butt, obediently not putting weight on my knee.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I found myself on the main floor of my parents' house. H and J were not there. N and my mom were sleeping in her room. I grabbed my computer and started working on my project. I glanced out the window and spotted a funnel cloud. Before my very eyes, it changed into a full-blown tornado. It was dangerously near the house. I went into my mom's room, grabbed N, woke up mom, and we all ran into the basement. Out basement windows, we watched a number of tornadoes in various sizes wreak havoc around us. None of them harmed my parents' house. I went into one of the rooms briefly, and discovered that my brother, R, was living there. The basement had been redesigned for him. R came out of his bedroom and asked where the hardwood flooring was. (Note: By this, he would have been referring to the flooring that is presently in my kitchen, waiting to be laid down in the basement. But at this point, we're still in my parents' house.) I told R that the flooring was in my kitchen, but R corrected me. R told me that the flooring was outside, getting rained on. The tornadoes had passed, so I decided to go out and check on the flooring. I went upstairs and out the front door.

I found myself back at my own house, on my front veranda. There was a box of flooring, but it only contained a few sample pieces. The main hardwood flooring boxes were still safely in my kitchen. But for some reason, my fridge was on the veranda. And some strange man was trying to make the fridge's water dispenser work. He figured out the locking mechanism and managed to get a glass of water. And then, he wandered into the house.

I followed the stranger into my house, and found myself in a large open space entirely comprised of the kitchen and bathroom, which is not quite the layout of my house. H was inside, as was my mother-in-law. The stranger began performing some kind of mental assessment on my mother-in-law and was asking her all kinds of questions. We tried to stop him, but we couldn't. She fainted from the stress. I went into the bathroom to get a cold towel for her.

Inside the bathroom, I heard H upstairs, putting J to bed. Cuddling J, and singing "Baby Mine". Soft and gentle. Calm and sweet. Such a beautiful lullaby.

**********

I awoke as H and J returned from playing at McDonald's. I was momentarily disoriented, as H and J had just been upstairs getting J ready for bed and it had just been night. But suddenly, afternoon sun streamed through my windows, and J was very awake.

I wonder what would have happened next had my dream been allowed to continue.

I Had a Dream

Last night, I had a dream. I dreamed that I was back at work after my mat leave, and we were running out of space in the office and had to put as much stuff as possible into storage. Where storage wasn't possible, we had to move everything closer together to keep it as compact as possible so that we would have more space.

In my dream, jugglepants was a packrat lawyer whose stuff we were trying to wane down. He had shelves and shelves of old plays and books - hundreds of them - not law books, but actual fiction and non-fiction type books such as we might expect to find all through the famed second hand bookstore. They were piled on bookcases throughout his office; the shelves were spread really far apart, and they spanned from floor to ceiling. So many books did jugglepants have that they were spilling out into the rest of the office. I was trying to convince him that, if he could put just eight of his other books into storage, one particularly prized collection would then fit into his office. But he could not bring himself to put eight of his books into storage, as he felt he might need them later. (Did I mention there were hundreds and hundreds of books in there?)

So it became my job to try to move all of the shelves closer together so that we could fit more shelving into jugglepants' office and thereby move more of his books in. But I did not want to take on the dubious task of unloading the shelves and then trying to reload them in the same order; (the order of the books only made sense to jugglepants). So jugglepants and I were arguing with our office manager as to whose job it was to unload and reload those shelves. It was determined that I had to prepare the office space for new shelving units and I had to move the shelves closer together, but jugglepants would have to unload and reload the shelves if he wished to keep the books in the same order.

Dreams are weird.