The house always wins, part I

Last night, during the hour long free for all that constitutes the time between Samson being physically put to bed and the time he falls asleep, I looked in on him to find him standing perched on the edge of his bed with one foot on the windowsill.

Needless to say I was not pleased. Of course, the windows are not only locked, but they are safety latched, so he wasn't getting outside. But he still could have fallen about a foot or so onto his train table and really hurt himself.

However, trying to impress this on him only elicited a lot of agreement like "I know" and "Yes, I could fall" followed by "It's snowing out, Daddy" and "I won't share my trains with Jacob."

Realizing that I was getting nowhere and that it was already near 8 o'clock, I hit upon the idea of taking all of Samson's trains and tracks off the train table as a punishment. So I grabbed a big plastic shopping bag with handles and started shoveling everything in. At last I had his attention, and so I told him that he'd been warned about standing on his bed and the window sill before and that because he didn't listen, he was being punished. No trains for a whole day. Satisfied that I'd come up with a judgment worthy of King Solomon, I duly deposited the giant bag-o-trains and tracks on the landing of our staircase for safekeeping.

Suitably chastened, Samson cried a bit, promised never to do it again, and was then given hugs and put to bed. Again. But this time he fell asleep.

Sometime around 2:15 this morning I was awakened out of a sound sleep [and I do mean sound: both Jane and Samson had been asleep for six hours by this point] by a crashing sound. At first I thought it was ice coming off the gutters or falling off the tree branches outside the window. But it was more of a wooden, plinky sound. Like Lincoln logs falling from the sky.

Actually it was Thomas and friends falling out of the bag, which had apparently split wide open in the middle of the night and was now duly expelling its little wooden denizens. Did I mention Samson has a lot of trains and track?

Mercifully enough neither Sam nor Jane woke up, but it took us a good 20 minutes to figure out how to quietly clean up this train wreck, and by the time we were finally settled back into bed, Jane was up and looking for some milk.

I'm not really sure what the moral of this story is, but those trains are back on the table tonight.