This morning my child Mouse, aged three, woke me up at 5 am by leaning over my face and showering me in a light but vigorous spray of biscuit crumbs, staring down at me like some kind of gargoyle.
I opened my eyes and confiscated the biscuit before fully waking up, belatedly recognising it as a biscuit that I had perceived Mouse sneaking away the previous week, prior to our going on holiday, but which I had not followed up on. “Don’t drop crumbs in my BED,” I said, strongly.
“I have to be in your bed, mummy,” Mouse said, producing a biscuit in their other hand and eating it while speaking.
“Why,” I said - I was not fully awake, of course.
“Because mine is all dirty,” Mouse said, eating the second biscuit, which I did not recognise.
The sleeping situation in our house is complicated, but I spend most of the night nominally in a bed in Mouse’s room, while Mouse theoretically sleeps on a floor mattress beside me. In practice this is always scrambled up, and there’s no knowing who is sleeping where. I investigated blearily and found that Mouse had secreted a small stash of Mouse-snacks between their bed and the wall, cunningly concealed by BLÅHAJ.
Mouse had quite naturally woken up peckish, remembered their earlier brilliance, recovered the biscuits, and had filled their own bed with biscuit crumbs. All very sophisticated.
“I can’t sleep,” Mouse said, watching me with interest, “my bed is not good. It’s all dirty.”
“We don’t eat in bed,” I said, calculating how much I didn’t want to wake up at 5 am.
“Why.”
“It makes your bed not good,” I said, deciding to get back into my own bed.
“Mummy?”
“What.”
“Mummy.”
“WHAT.”
“Your bed’s not good,” Mouse said judgmentally. “It’s all scratchy of biscuits. you been eating in yours bed?”
