Full Blown Randomness

I've been up since 2 a.m. this morning, so my brain, she is not functioning properly. Well, at least not properly enought for a coherent, single topic post. So, random bullets ahoy!

• Even though I was a little annoyed at the short notice that the kids in Gabbie's classroom would be exchanging valentines and treats today (I found out when I dropped her off yesterday morning), I was pretty excited to get my craftiness on and make some cards. I'll have to post a picture - we made bunny faces out of hearts and captioned them, "Somebunny Loves You!" They're completely adorable, if I may toot my own horn. Thank goodness I had a whole crate of craft supplies though, otherwise I would have been SOL - the stores around here were pretty much sold out of valentines before last night and I wasn't braving heading across town to the craft store with the roads still being pretty snow covered. This morning I told Gabbie that between the valentine emergency and her love of fresh baked breakfast foods, she's lucky she has me as a mom, and I can pull off all sorts of those kinds of things.
• Wow, that was not well written. Sorry about that. I'd fix it, but I'm tired.
• Gabbie caught a cold that has felled most of the kids at her daycare - I'm pretty sure they all have RSV or some sort of related cold (there have been 3 confirmed RSV cases). There are some things I don't mind about a sick kid, namely that all she wants to do is cuddle, and there's nothing I like more than cuddling with her. However, there are two things I really, really don't like about having a sick Gabbie around. Thing one is that she stops sleeping, and thing two is that she stops eating, and those two things together are enough to drive me absolutely batty. So batty that the other day I gave in and let her have a cookie and pretzels for lunch because those are the only things she would eat, and I had to get some calories in her somehow. The sleeping thing, though. It is killing me this time, especially since she was finally sleeping through the night again, and had gone on a two week stretch of doing so. It really is a cruel joke when that happens - they're finally sleeping, and you think, "Well, thank God that's over with finally," and then they stop again, and it's worse than you remember, the not sleeping. I have to admit, I am not my best, most temper controlled self at 3 in the morning with a toddler that would rather be playing or poking me in the face or talking. Not my best self at all.
• So, I think it's safe to say that I have maybe officially watched and listened to too many shows about ghosts. I was doing okay, and could watch pretty much anything and nothing was really bothering me all that much. I just feel really safe and comfortable in our house. But I think the sleep deprivation is getting to me, because the past few nights I have really managed to creep myself out. Last night while I was willing Gabbie to sleep (she was quietly lying there trying to figure out how to get past my defenses and stick her finger in my ear), I remembered a story that makes me really hope Gabbie never has an imaginary friend. Remembering the story creeped me out enough that I had a hard time falling back asleep, even though Gabbie had finally drifted off, hence why I both was up since 2 a.m. and need to lay off the ghost shows. If you don't want to be creeped out, don't read on.

So here's my sister's friend's creepy imaginary(?) friend story:

H's mom related once that H had a very vibrant imagination when she was younger. H had an imaginary friend that caused all sorts of trouble. The friend (I can't remember it's name, but it had a very old-timey sounding nickname) was blamed for all sorts of michief around the house. Things would go missing, and H would blame it on her friend, and her parents would blame it on her. Things would end up broken, and H would blame it on her friend, and her parents would blame it on her. H would be roaming the house in the middle of the night, saying that her friend woke her up to play, and her parents would tell her to tell the friend it was sleeping time and send her back to bed, where she would lay talking to her friend until the wee hours, and be incredibly tired the next day, again, all because of the friend. H talked about the friend all the time, and her parents just thought she was being a weird kid, and were even sometimes embarrassed about how H would insist all these things were because of her friend. They even considered taking her to therapy to work out behavior issues.

One day the friend just disappeared, and so did the weird activity that H always blamed on her friend. Her parents thought it was weird, but they went with it, happy that things around the house rarely went missing or were broken, and H was sleeping through the night and behavior problems ended.

At the end of the story, H's mom wondered aloud why the behavior stopped so suddenly. H chimed in, "Well, mom, it's because you trapped him. Remember when you fixed the hole in the wall behind my door? That was his home and when you patched it up he couldn't get out any more."

H still insists her friend was real.

Creepy!