For Lydia, Olof’s trips out of town are always a bit of a treat, mostly because she gets to take over his side of our bed for as long as he’s away. When he comes home, it’s always a bit of a struggle to get her to return to her own room and we can count on plenty of disturbances the first night. As exasperating as this is, particularly on a schoolnight, it can sometimes be good for a few laughs, too.
We all got to bed fairly late on Wednesday when Olof came home from Malta, but we finally got everyone settled in about midnight, or so we thought. Not long after we turned off the lights, we heard footsteps and a tentative “Mom?”
“Yes, Lydia?” I answered.
“There’s something glowing in my room.”
I sighed and tried to keep the annoyance from my voice. “What is it?”
“I don’t know. It’s, like,” she hesitated a bit here. “Like, some glowing thing.”
“Imagine that,” I said to Olof as I got out of bed to go check out the glow.
It turned out to be nothing more than moonlight shining in through her bedroom window, and, assured that there was nothing foul afoot, she slept easily.
Olof and I couldn’t help laughing about it, though, when I returned to bed.
My daughter has had some interesting sleepwalking incidents recently. She is either experiencing a frustrating/distressing moment or running away from something. More than once we’ve set her up on the floor in our room (sleeping bag on a plush carpet) and she’s awoken the next day, surprised by her location. It would disturb me if I hadn’t done the exact same thing as a child myself.
That was a sweet little story.
Is English still your daughter’s main, i.e. strongest language? It’s her mother tongue, of course, and always will be, but at some point it seems that the language the child studies at school will take over as the dominant language. Does Olof speak to her in English or Swedish?What about her little brother? She may speak to him in English now, but most likely the two of them will end up communicating in Swedish only. If you stay in Sweden, that is.
Oh and BTW, I saw an interesting item on DN’s website: a huge Buddharama temple is going to be built in some little village, Fredrika (?), near Skelleftea. That’s not far from where you live. Exciting, no?