The bed.

Lately, the Animalia's favorite place to play is the bed. Any bed. It can be Nana's bed, Mama's bed, or even "the playpen bed." So once she's in a bed, she wraps the blankets around herself and lays down on the pillow. She scrunches her eyes closed. Then she announces that she's asleep, that it's nighttime, that she's "dreaming in the night." She pops up to a sitting position and laughs. "Aya's awake!"


The dreaming thing really gets me. She talks about dreams, sometimes, when she actually wakes up from actual sleep, she tells us what she dreamt. "Aya's dreaming about Daddy," she told me one morning when she woke up and found that her dad had already left to work. "I dream in the nighttime," she tells us when we ask her. "I want to have dreaming!" she says when she's exhausted and desperate to go to bed.

Last night, she woke up in the middle of the night. I think she had a nightmare. "Dreaming!" she said in a half cry, "Bad boy!" I scooped her up, kissed and hugged her and she fell asleep with her head against my shoulder. In the morning, I asked her about it. "Did you have a scary dream?" "Dreaming is bad boy. No, no, no dreams!" she said, in broken toddlerish.