Saturday, May 14, 2011

sleepy time adventures

tonight i was tucking the kid in & kissing her goodnight and i had a flashback to my own childhood. you see, she's sleeping in a pillow pile on her bedroom floor rather than in her bed. every so often she makes up a little nest somewhere in her room & then sleeps there for a few nights & then the fun wears off & she goes back to her top bunk again. this time the space is really small & she can't even stretch her legs out, but she's curled up like a big puppy, happy as can be.

when i was a kid, my brother (who is only a year older than myself) and i used to sleep all over the place and our nests weren't limited to our bedrooms. we slept on various floors, under the baby grand piano with couch cushions propped up around it to close us in. we slept in the dry bathtub. we draped blankets over the kitchen table & slept under there and at one point, we even slept under the ping pong table in the cellar. i didn't know until i woke up the next morning, but sleeping in our funky basement caused my brother to have an asthma attack & he had to be taken for medical treatment in the middle of the night. i wondered why he wasn't still down there on the concrete floor with me when i woke up the next morning, but i never could've guessed the answer.

i slept in a crack/fort space in between a couple sheets of sheetrock & beams in the cellar when we discovered it was in there & we could slither in if we dragged up a ladder and shimmied in just so. there was even a peak hole where we could spy out to see if anyone was coming. or to beg for food if we got hungry & it was too much effort to slip & slide back out of the hole.

sometimes we had an adventure together and camped out with our sleeping bags side by side and other times we had solo adventures. on one of my wacky solo sleep-outs, i chose to bed down in my favorite weird place, which was behind the couch. i'd slept there on several previous occasions, but this time i decided that i wanted to take my book with me so i could read for a bit before going to sleep. however, since i was wedged in tightly behind the couch in such a way that i couldn't even bend my legs in my holly hobby sleeping bag, there was very little light by which to read my book. then i had the great idea to take my bedroom lamp with me. i ran up & got it, plugged it in & realized that it would never fit back there with the lampshade, so i yanked the shade off & sure enough, it fit just fine then. i got myself & my book situated with the cat curled up close to my pillow to enjoy the newly installed heat lamp.


 i was reading myself into a slumber when one of my parents came running into the room, clearly upset.

"what is that smell? what's burning?! SHERILIN!?!"

that's when we realized that in putting that shadeless lamp back there with me, the light bulb was just about pressed against the fabric on the back of the couch & i had burned a hole in the back of the couch, which, by that time was a smoldering mess of blackened, plaid nylon.

but i'll always take with me the joy of my childhood sleeping adventures. being free to pick a spot, any weird spot & curl up there for a night of dreaming about being a hobbit or a fairy or a dallas cowboy cheerleader, without any adult telling me that it wasn't proper or acceptable to sleep in the place that fed my imagination with a healthy dose of happiness. so thank you, mom and dad, and i pass that gift down to my own girl.

18 comments:

  1. I used to sleep on the couch or in my sleeping bag on my bedroom floor or living room floor.
    I am sure my parents thought I was nuts for not wanting to sleep in my nice bed, but they let me sleep where I wanted to.

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  2. You must have been a brave child. If I slept behind our couch while growing up...... shew! I wonder if you could get some type of sickness from all the cookie crumbs, dust bunnies, broken toys, candy wrappers and smelly lost socks.

    (But it is a sweet story!)

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  3. Such good memories! I remember other mothers telling me they hoped my kids wouldn't tell their kids about the sleeping freedom I gave them, because then their kids would be begging to do it too and they weren't going to agree to it. There are so many things parents have to say no to for safety or moral reasons or just lack of resources, why not say yes to everything else? I'm glad Brooke gets to enjoy that same freedom. Maybe this summer she'll want to sleep in the big hole in my yard, pretending she's a wolf in a den.

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  4. That's very cool - as a kid I had lots of hidey holes around the house, but don't remember ever sleeping in one - probably because it left me too vulnerable to the monsters that lived in the closet.

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  5. Great post! I love memories like that! You wanted to be a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader? I wanted to be a Dallas Cowboy linebacker. I thought cheerleaders were sissies. Now I realize it was more that I was a Tomboy! LOL

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  6. I had a similar experience with unprotected light (gee, that sounds kinda dirty). Deciding it was too cold in Maine to put up the Christmas lights on the outside, I chose to ring the INSIDE of our window. Well, my recliner was next to the window with the OUTSIDE lights on the INSIDE. There was also a blanket draped over the back of the recliner. Well, I...uh... reclined. In short order, my wife rushed into the living room wanting to know what was burning. I, of course, looked up from my paper and quite helpfully answered, "What?" Wouldn't you know, the blanket had brushed up against one of the bulbs and started smoldering (hot things have a tendency to do that, I suppose).
    Ho, ho, ho, Merry Christmas. I almost set the house on fire.

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  7. wonderful memories. I wanted to be an astronaut :-) Happy weekend

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  8. My brother lit our yard on fire. He's okay now, not in jail or anything.

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  9. Once when I was young, I thought the light cast by the lamp in my room was too boring, so I decided I'd melt some wax crayons on the bulb and voila--have colourful light. I burnt my finger on the hot wax, and instead of getting sympathy, I got in trouble.

    In other news, the thought of sleeping in some of those hidey holes of yours gives me the major heebyjeebies now that I'm all growed up. Ah, the blissful unawareness of childhood.

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  10. I once slept with my head in a bowl of corn flakes.

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  11. And now as we get older we need routine, sheesh.

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  12. I used to make "nests" too, except I think I called them caves. Then I'd wake up in my bed not knowing how I got there.

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  13. She'll have great memories now of her own sleeping adventures!

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  14. My son has a bed with a ladder so that you can put another bed under it, but instead we just put his toy box under there. He likes to hang a blanket off the side of his mattress so that it closes it off under there and "camp"!

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  15. Awe, this is nice! Great parents for sure!

    Glad you said good riddance to school for the year. I am almost there! I hope the move goes well and it's not too crazy!

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  16. This is So cute! I know just what you mean. So funny that you mention the ping pong table. My middle school gal friends and I used to rotate sleepovers every weekend and we always slept under Sara's ping pong table! Every time.

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  17. This made me cry and then laugh at the hole in the couch!!!
    Great story!

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  18. I miss random nesting too, but now that I'm old, waking up is a lot more painful if I haven't slept on a nice pillowtop mattress. Hurray for aging!

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don't let me be the only one doing the talking around here. spill your guts!