Kids do the darndest things
So the Spod has been keeping me up a lot of late, I gather this is normal for new babies. The N00b however, not to be outdone has also been trying to wake the house up at all hours of the night. For a while now we have had to put a piece of gaffa tape over the front of her bedtime nappy in order to stop her taking it off and wetting the bed. We have to make sure that when we check on her before we go to bed, we check that she is still fully clothed under her pyjamas. The wily child is very good at taking off the nappy without dislodging any of her outer clothes! As per the rules of escalation, this all worked for a short time until she worked out how to take off the nappy in spite of the gaffa tape and started doing it after we'd gone to bed. More and more Gaffa has now been deployed, to the point that it takes me a good two minutes to get the damn nappy off without scissors, and so the N00b has had to change her tactics.
A few years ago we were burgled in this house, at just this time of year. Nothing valuable was taken (we don't actually own anything valuable, which helps in these cases) but as Christmas comes around, I do tend to get a bit more sensitive to doors rattling in the middle of the night, which is actually a pretty useful thing for a larper and/or parent, and so not too bad. Except that last night I was woken up by the bathroom door rattling at 3am. For some reason the N00b had got out of her bed and locked herself in the grown-up's bathroom in the pitch darkness. Just to put the creepy-child icing on the cake, she had taken all of the toilet rolls out of the packet and stacked them into a pyramid in the centre of the room. As you do at 3am in complete darkness...
Luckily for me, many moons ago my good friend Chris told me an anecdote about the time he locked himself in the bathroom when he was two years old. Realising that the bolts on my bathroom doors were just begging for toddlers to fasten themselves in, I asked my dad to replace the door locks with the sort that can be opened from the outside with a coin or something. This meant that I was able to free the N00b from her sinister predicament using the other end of the scissors that I usually use for cutting her out of a gaffa-nappy. I wonder what the next level of escalation is after this?