The Battle of the Burrow
thane November 6th, 2006
Last night, Tory was too tired. Going to bed can be hard for her,
and when she is too tired, it is a real fight. For some reason she
fixated on “building a burrow” (a mountain of pillows) that she
would climb inside. We told her that she could have some burrow
time after we got ready and before books. We got ready fairly
quickly, read a little, then built a burrow. This is when things
started heading south.
Tory started getting very frustrated trying to climb under her
burrow. I did my best to help, but it wasn’t working the way she
had in her mind. I calmed her down and we did some reading till
lights out. Once the lights were off, Tory tried to get in the
burrow again, and started getting really frustrated. I
tried to calm her down and dismantle the burrow, but that was just
not going to happen without a fight. I tried letting her go to
sleep on top of the burrow, but it became obvious she wasn’t going
to be able to fall asleep there.
It was also obvious that if I didn’t get out of there, I was going
to blow a gasket and say something I was going to regret.
So I bailed. When I got downstairs, I looked at Joh, gestured
towards the stairs, and said “Your turn. Good luck getting her off
that f**cking burrow.”
As she headed upstairs, Joh new this would end in tears. Better to
have it end now, while there was one parent who still had their
shit together.
Johanna entered the bedroom and turned on the light. Then she
started tossing the pillows back into place. “I need a burrow!”
Tory was adamant that she needed a burrow that contained the body
pillow. Joh offered her other pillows or to have the body pillow
for a short while, but Tory wanted none of it. So Joh shut off the
light. At this point, Tory totally lost the script. She didn’t
know what was supposed to happen or what she wanted, but she knew
this wasn’t it. I could hear her side of the “discussion” from
downstairs. Within 20 minutes, Joh was back downstairs.