Sleeper Creature

If you pass by our house in the middle of the night and see a little
girl passed out motionless on the floor in the hallway right inside
our front door, be not alarmed: it's just our Jada, who has decided
that the rug outside her bedroom is a preferable place to crash rather
than the bed inside her bedroom.

She is truly a strange creature when it comes to sleeping. I guess it
all started when we ripped her crib away from her and gave it to Aaron
when arrived a year and change ago. That crib was her nest, and the
mattress we put on her bedroom floor was a poor substitute. In time,
her bed became littered with more stuffed animals and books than were
once in her crib; and, to boot, not only did we have to leave the
hallway light on outside her bedroom, but we had to leave her bedroom
light on. That's right, through the night, she sleeps with the light
on.

Wait, it gets better. Partly because her bed is so cluttered, and
partly for God only knows what reason, she has taken to sleeping half
on her mattress and half on the rug on her bedroom floor. Some days,
she's off the bed altogether. In fact, when we were in St. Thomas,
her bed was a foldaway cot with a twin mattress: by the second night,
she had abandoned the cot and the mattress and was sleeping on the
hardwood floor (!), and so by the third night, we put away the cot and
put the mattress on the floor, so she could resume her "half mattress,
half floor" routine.

And now, in the past week, she's left her bedroom altogether. Three
nights in a row, she's moved half of her bed toys into the portable
crib in the hallway, crawled in there herself, and fallen back asleep.
After we convinced her to go back to her bedroom, she listened for
one night, and then decided to split the difference, crashing on the
circular rug in between her bedroom door and the portable crib. In
the middle of the first floor hallway. Right underneath the hallway
light. In plain sight of our front door.

The good news is that whenever she's decided to sleep outside her
bedroom, we can actually turn her bedroom light off, and save a few
pennies on electricity for the night. The bad news is we have a
motionless creature curled up in our hallway. But she does pop up in
the early morning, none the worse for the wear. So we'll chalk this
up as a phase and see what happens next. Just warning you not to be
alarmed if you ever peek into our house overnight.