+ Surreality at 3 a.m. +
You blissfully slept through a scary, freaky series of events last night. OH my. We all went to sleep fairly normally last night around 9:15. All was quiet and well in our house until a few minutes after 3:00 a.m. I woke up to Joe, touching my arm and sitting bolt upright in bed, whispering "Ceili's toy! Ceili's toy! It's going off. Someone's in the house." Foggy, I answered, "Maybe it just fell. It was on the edge of the couch I think." This is the toy in question (it was called a Magic Screen Learning Pal when I bought it and it's actually really cool). So Joe soundlessly got out of bed and grabbed his scary shock stick thing (he's a security guard, remember) and peeked out the bedroom door. He must have stood there for 2 minutes, with the sounds of the toy wafting through the otherwise silent house. "Hel-looo, my friends! *HONK* Let's play and learn! *HONK*" That's some freaky s#It at 3 a.m. He listened and stared intently into the near dark (thankfully there was a pretty high, full moon last night that let a lot of light into the house). As it ended its cycle and started to put itself to sleep, I felt relief. But when it ended and Joe stepped gingerly now into the hall, what happened? The damned thing started up again! Oy!

E v e r so slowly, Joe took a step, turned on the hall light outside Ceili's bedroom (me whispering earnestly, "Shut her door!"), peeked carefully into Ceili's room without shutting her door, and went down the hall into the living room. After a minute or so (my hand on the phone next to me this whole time, ready to call 9-1-1), he came back down the hall and turned on the house alarm. I jumped up and went to do my own double-check (hey, why not?) and to turn off the toy.

But get this... The robot was sitting solidly on the ground, next to the couch but touching nothing, right where I'd put it when I realized last night it was about to fall off the ottoman where Ceili had left it. You get that? It wasn't touching anything. It was sitting there, calmly chatting away to itself at 3 a.m.

I turned the switch off on the back and headed back to bed. Not that I could sleep. Every time I started to drift back off to sleep, I heard "Hel-looo my friends!" and the unmistakable tap-tap-tap of footsteps coming down the hall in my twilight imagination.

Blissfully, you slept through the whole thing.