In honour of a special birthday

It is one of my favourite people’s birthday today. She is 5 years old and probably one of the funniest people I know. The funniest thing I remember her doing is on New Year’s Eve last year.

Because Mummy had said she could stay up until the final countdown to midnight, she was told her and her younger sister must have a nap during the day. She agreed but obviously the excitement of the whole day made sleep difficult. They went upstairs and promised to go to sleep. For the next fifteen minutes, the sound of footsteps dancing about was all too clear on the ceiling. Giggles trickled down the stairs and the little singsong voices were quite clearly awake and playing a game.

After the fifteen minutes of fun, they both descended the stairs, serious faces on, and announced to Mummy, “Mummy, we’ve been asleep for ages. For TWO HOURS!”

“Have you really?” asked Mummy, suspiciously.

“Two hours!” she repeated, putting up two of her fingers, for emphasis.

“Ok,” said Mummy.

The day continued on and it came to the evening time. We were watching Ice Age, everyone cuddling on the sofa. And that’s when the tiredness-induced meltdown happened.

There was this scene where we see some eggs, unguarded, in a corner somewhere. There are big booming sounds, footsteps of an approaching dinosaur. And my favourite little birthday girl had an utter freak-out.

“Ah! Ah! I’m scared! Turn it off! TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFF!”

We said soothing things like, “It’s ok. We’ve turned it off. Look, it’s just the normal TV. Oo, Spongebob Square Pants is on. We like him. It was only a silly dinosaur, he can’t hurt you.”

It didn’t matter! It didn’t matter that the dinosaur was inside the TV, she was scared and that was that. She wasn’t interested in Spongebob Square Pants. In fact, she wanted the television off altogether. She was terrified! She cried uncontrollably and as we all watched in confusion, cuddles from Mummy eventually soothed her a little. She gulped big sobs down and rambled on, the words hardly decipherable, until suddenly, in a fit of confession, she sat up and announced to her mother:

“MUMMY! WE DIDN’T GO TO SLEEP FOR TWO HOURS! WE WERE PLAYING GAMES! I’M SORRY!”

Probably the best voluntary confession I’ve ever witnessed.

Shortly after this, at 9.15pm, we sneakily wound the wall clock forward and said it was midnight soon, then all stood, counted 10 down to 1 and had a big ‘celebration’ before sending poor tired child off to bed.