Stoopid parenting decisions.

Some months ago, in an attempt to gain another 1.5 hours sleep a night, I made a decision I’m now living to regret. After the boys had gone to bed for the night, I took our small and rather innocuous looking oil heater into their room and set it on low, assuming that Ryan was waking at the crack of dawn because he was cold. When I woke naturally at 6am, I immediately hailed my cunning plan a success. No small children in my bed! Huzzah! I went to check on them, only to find my little Ry huddled in the furthest corner of his bed, shaking with fear. He was terrified of the clicking noise the heater was making as it cooled down & warmed up again. I have no idea how long he’d been in that state but I hope with all my heart it wasn’t long.

Because I am extremely daft & refuse to learn from my errors, I repeated the whole fiasco the following night. Mistake number 2.

I appear to have ruined the child for life. He is convinced that the heater crept in of its own accord in the middle of night and switched itself on. I’ve tried to tell him that I moved it in there but he is adamant that I didn’t. According to him, the heater sleeps in the lounge room during the day and at night, if it hears a noise, it wakes up. Its lights come on and it wheels itself around the house. I can see why he’s petrified – I’m beginning to feel a little freaked out myself.

Anyway, the months have gone on – he’s still not sleeping in his room & the mattress on the floor next to my bed is starting to look like a permanent fixture. The heater was happily living in the lounge room and nobody was paying it any attention at all. Life was rosy (well, rosy-ish) yet suddenly Ryan has started noticing it again & the paranoia set in. This is where I make mistake number 3.

I told him I’d take the bloody thing up to the shed and that’d fix it once and for all. Except I got lazy. It was raining and I didn’t feel like padding up the boggy yard with it so I crammed in the back of my wardrobe. The kids rarely go in there so I thought I’d get away with it, at least temporarily. Little did I know the kids had earmarked that very spot for a new cubby house…

So now he thinks it’s crept down from the shed and is hiding in my cupboard. I should just start directing my weekly wage straight to his therapist, shouldn’t I?