What Do You Get The Girl Who Has Everything?

Well, a little more than a week before her fifth birthday ... Wrigley got her first nightmare!

On three consecutive nights, she had three tiny nightmares. One was about a river (that's all she could tell me about it); one was about falling off a cliff ("and then ..." quothe the Wrig, "... and then ... that's all I remember."); and one was about falling over a waterfall and "Mommy and you were on the shore and that wasn't fun."

On the third night, she refused to even try to fall asleep. So I blatantly plagiarized from a story that someone wrote during the children's writing conference I attended this summer. The story was about a boy who had nightmares, so his mom helped him make "nightmare spray."

Wrig and I came upstiars and I hollered, "Chris, can you look up the recipe for the nightmare spray on the internet?" Not exactly dying to relinquish valuable computer time, she hollered back, "Oh, I already printed it up. It's in the back of the purple book [where we keep our recipes]."

I flipped open the purple book, found a recipe that didn't have a picture of food on it, and said, "Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh." I took Wrig into the kitchen where we filled a spray bottle with 1 c. of water, 1/8 tsp. of salt, and two drops of lavender oil. I told Wrig the recipe says you have to shake it up and say, "No more nightmares" three times. I have never heard her say anything more passionately than those three "no more nightmares." We went downstairs, sprayed a little nightmare spray outside the bedroom doors, and cuddled blissfully to sleep.

After about three nightmareless nights (spraying the doors carefully each night), Wrig - ever the scientist - asked, "I wonder how the nightmare spray works?"

The answer, my friends, is that nightmare spray works quite well, thank you very much.