Garden of your (Sleepy) Mind

We're back from vacation!  At some point I'll post a fraction of the bazillion pictures we took but today I wanted to share a story from last night (with a little background information):

Aurelia has finally decided that she needs to go to bed earlier than we've been putting her down.  Her previous bedtime was around 9 pm - if we tried to get her to sleep earlier than that, she'd always wake up 40 minutes later, all pumped up from her "nap".  Then right before vacation (as in, 2 days before), it became apparent that she needed an early bedtime.  Which was awesome timing, let me tell you - suddenly we had to put her to bed at 7:30, however Minnesota is in a different time zone so she really, really wanted to go to bed at 6:30, which could pretty much never happen.  So there was lots of tears and screaming every night - whee!

But I digress.  With this earlier bedtime we're now trying to figure out bedtime rituals and what to do with Mr. D while putting Aurelia to bed.  When both Rick and I are home it's not a huge issue, but 2 - 3 nights a week it's just me and the kiddos!  So I've been trying to find ways to include Dashiell in Aurelia's bedtime ritual.  We have been letting him read "Goodnight Moon" to her after I feed her, which he loves to do and we love to hear.  Last night while I was feeding her, he read "Harold and the Purple Crayon", then after I fed her he once again read "Goodnight Moon".  Then I suggested singing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", since I have been singing that to her before her naps.  He said no, he wanted to sing something else.  Then he proceeded to sing his own rendition of this:



We had watched this video after a few of my Facebook friends posted it last weekend (watched it about 10 times, I might add, since you can never watch something just once with a 4-year-old).  It's totally trippy but I kind of love it!  This from someone who never liked Mr. Rogers growing up (Captain Kangaroo I could get behind, but for some reason Mr. Rogers always annoyed me).

Anyway, D didn't know all the lyrics so he made up a few of his own - I believe he was growing sugar snap peas in the garden of his mind, along with tomatoes and rainbows and steam machines.  It went on for much longer than I would have liked, but it was funny nonetheless.  I can't say that "Garden of your Mind" is going to be part of our nightly ritual, though - just imagine the weird dreams Aurelia would end up having!