As with all children (I imagine), our fae won’t always recognise that she is tired. She will sometimes accept that she is tired – she is always tired; she won’t sodding sleep, so it’s always a good bet that she has a sleep debt – but you will always know.
She has two moods when she is tired. When she is at a point that sleep will come easy and putting her to bed is as simple as pointing out there is a shelf she can place her body on, she will turn into a flaming ball or rage. Seriously, nothing you can do will be right when she is in this mood. Some salient examples:
Two nights ago she was chatting about what to do in the morning. She told me she wanted to go to a specific garden centre called ‘Cherry Hill’. I agreed that this was indeed doable, and we would head there. Ten minutes later she asked what we were doing the next day. I said we were going to Cherry Hill. She threw herself onto the bench kicking and screaming and that she didn’t want to do that, she wanted to walk up a mountain. When I pointed out she said she wanted to go to the garden centre, she paused mid-flail and said “Oh yeah”, giggled once, and went back to her food. I’m not sure what else I was supposed to say at this point, but I’m very sure I was NOT walking up the mountain.
Last night she looked out the patio doors and started crying, when I asked what was wrong she explained through hiccuping sniffles that there were no daisies in the lawn… Well, no, there aren’t. There never has been. We have dandelions and clover in abundance but strangely no daisies.
She got up, marched outside and screamed at the lawn that it was growing the wrong flowers, that it needed to grow daisies and demanded that I immediately made daisy seeds materialize in front of her. When I failed to do this she went back to crying and wailing.
And then there’s her other mood. Her second mood is more dangerous: when she is beyond this point, she will become manic. This means you will need at least two hours to get her to sleep (which is more like passing out through exhaustion) and will take you through a foray of bizarre scenarios that you never thought were possible.
I touched on one of these in ‘Notes to my daughter’ but allow me to introduce you to Daniel.
Daniel is a rock. He is a very special rock. You see, Daniel was the last in a series of overheated rocks that she found on a walk we went on one evening. Most of these rocks were cured by “cooling” them in the river she promptly dropped them in, but Daniel was more seriously ill. He was diagnosed with a blood illness where ‘his white blood cells have become attackers not protectors’. Basically she decided her rock had leukemia.
Yes, we can point out that this is not possible because 1. It doesn’t have red blood cells, or 2. White blood cells and 3. It’s a rock. But none of this deterred her from bringing Daniel home, placing him in isolation in a water bottle, feeding him ‘medicine’ (sea salt) and then declaring him better a few days later before releasing him back to his friends with a purple “one” drawn on him (some sort of capture, mark, release tracking programme?). Don’t ask me, I just had to help nurse a sick rock.
I have also had to help bathe her in this condition where I was informed that the bath was a pond, ok… and that she was wearing SCUBA equipment, following so far… and that she is fleeing from a “running pretend shark” (at least it wasn’t real….that went in the sea… and then she needed to get out because she was pond sick)
So there is nothing wrong with her imagination. And she may not always tell you that she’s tired but believe me you will know.
Raising the Modern Fae 