Nocturnal Leonine Antics

When I greet Finny in the morning, I usually ask him something like “How was your night, did you have good sleep?” or “Did you have sweet dreams?”. Sometimes the answer is “Yes, hi Mom-o,” but lately the answer has been “No. It was a baaaaad night,” which is accompanied with a twinkle in Finny’s eye. Then we launch into the following routine:

M: “A bad night, huh? What happened?”
F: “Leo…broke the ceiling again!”
M: “Broke the ceiling?! Oh my goodness! That sounds horrible! What did he do?”
F: “Well he climbed up there, and started hammering the ceiling until it was all broken. I think he had a jackhammer. He broke it into big pieces, and then he threw the pieces in the garbage.”
M: “Wow! But now it’s all fixed! Did he do that, too? Did it keep you awake, all that noise?”
F: “Yeah. It was really noisy. But I helped him fix it and then we went back to sleep [pronounced “sweep”].”

Don’t ask me how we got started on that tangent, because I don’t remember, but clearly it’s something that’s stuck with Finny. He gets a real kick out of bringing it up and riffing on it. We haven’t specifically discussed how Leo gets up there, but I’m guessing jetpack. And it’s always fun to make up stories where Leo is up to mischievous activities. Now that it’s become a regular story, we like to add our own embellishments (which he loves) like “oh yeah, I thought I saw Leo’s head poking up through the floor last night” (our bedroom is right above Finny’s).

[For my part, Finn greeted me after yesterday’s nap by announcing, “I’m a little crossing bell at a train track,” of the sort that swing back and forth. Off to look for his shoes, he noted, “I have to get my dirt”–because in what else would a crossing bell be anchored? –J.]