Anecdotes, part 2

This year, Santa brought Marianne a stuffed prairie dog, along with a book all about prairie dogs. Stop rolling your eyes at the lameness of that gift. Santa fully understands that, because we live a block away from open space with a population of approximately 8 million prairie dogs, Marianne is infatuated with them. While most kids make cow noises and pig noises, Marianne loves to make high pitched "eep eep" noises in imitation of our neighborhood prairie dogs. Anyway, Santa knows all, and therefore the gift was a pretty huge hit.

On Christmas day at nap time, Marianne didn't really think she was very tired. I, on the other hand, was exhausted. So I laid down on the bed in our shared room while Marianne was put down for her nap on her inflatable travel bed. She brought her prairie dog book with her, since our naptime policy is generally that as long as she stays in bed, she can "read" a book. (I'm of the opinion that you can't actually force a child to sleep, but you can force a child to spend some downtime in bed.) As I'm drifting to sleep, I hear Marianne making up prairie dog stories to go with the pictures in her book. I've no idea what that naughty prairie dog was up to, but most of what I heard coming from Marianne was "I say, NO NO prairie dog. Time out prairie dog. I say prairie dog NO NO!"

I'd rather not dwell on what this might imply about our parenting techniques or our child's imagination, thank you.