And speaking of small children, of which I wrote about last week, I have a friend who is 15 years younger than me. I don’t hold it against her, but she is pregnant with her 3rd child and I have the pleasure (or pain – however one views the third trimester of pregnancy) of reliving my own fertile days. She texted me one day in an attempt to set up a coffee date, while also trying to get her youngest to nap.

There are stark differences in our child-rearing days, the most glaring of these is the cell phone. I may have had a cell phone by the time my kids were toddlers and was probably lucky it wasn’t as big a brick like the earliest cell phones. Just the fact I’d seen one of those ancient beasts makes me feel like a dinosaur. When my kids were well into school I was in a little neighborhood coffee klatch and one of the gals said, “When I was in high school, cell phones couldn’t take pictures.” She was also 15 years younger than me and I wanted to take a vote to kick her out of the group with a comment like that. But the other two ladies were also younger than me, not as much, but still. In my head she was off the island by reminding me how much older I was.

Anyway, back to my currently pregnant friend. I texted back that my youngest didn’t like to nap either. It didn’t help that her older sister, who had always been a great napper, decided she wasn’t going to take naps anymore after my youngest was born. All I can remember of those days was that I was exhausted.

In fact, my youngest didn’t particularly like going to bed at night either and didn’t sleep through the night until I put her in a twin bed when she was just under two years old. She must’ve thought we were partying or something without her and I guess putting her in a “big girl bed” gave her the capability to get out of the bed and check for late night events.

Not that she ever did, because she was afraid of creatures under her bed. Which was funny, because she had a futon frame holding up her mattress and it was flush with the floor, so if she rolled out of bed she only had four inches to fall. I was aware she had typical childhood fears of monsters. I had “monster spray” that I would spray around my kids’ rooms at night to quell the beasts. It was some sort of calming mixture I bought in Catalina when I went on a cruise one year. The ritual calmed both my daughters and they slept through the night.

Perhaps it worked too well on my youngest, as one morning I went into her room to find her curled up on her pillow at the head of the bed. She had barfed on her blankets in the middle of the night. She must’ve been about three at the time, because she was able to tell me she didn’t want to bother me. I felt horrible thinking my little one didn’t want to get me up after she got sick. I had never told her not to wake me in the middle of the night.

It wasn’t until she was a teenager that she explained herself. She thought there was a beaver living under her bed and she was afraid it would grab her ankle or bite her. Though I had explained to her there was no “under”, it didn’t matter. The monster spray kept strange things from wandering around the room, but there’s no accounting for beavers.

Gretchen Leigh is a stay-at-home mom who lives in Covington. You can read more of her writing on her website livingwithgleigh.com, on Facebook at “Living with Gleigh by Gretchen Leigh.”. Her column is available every week at maplevalleyreporter.com under the Life section.