The Bedtime Stair-Climb

One last pre-scheduled post.  It's Friday, and our little family should be tucked away in Millers Creek at my Grandpa's house.  Where *I hope* all babies are sleeping soundly after a day of farm fun and visiting friends.  We'll be home tomorrow, and I daresay we'll be ready to be back under our own roof!  

Things I'm Inevitably Missing #4: The Bedtime Stair-Climb

I remember when I was little, Ashley and Brad and I had funny going-to-bed routines. 

Sometimes there was a parade down the hall, dropping off each kid in our respective beds.  Pretty sure our parade music was the Carolina fight song.  You know, rah rah Car'lina, -lina, etc, but instead of ending the song with go tar heels! we'd have a family shout of let's get naked! which was (apparently) (of course) the best way to convince us to undress and put on our PJs. 

Sometimes there was a silly (read: inane) game of "where are the girls??" during which Ashley and I hid in plain sight under our sheets and our parents pretended they couldn't find us.

Sometimes there was a post-lights-out hushed (or not so much, knowing Ashley and me) round of "let's! play! grandma!" from our bunk beds where we (I think?) pretended we were about to go visit our grandparents (or something?)...

And then there was the occasional situation in the room I shared with Ashley, where one of us would pass gas (we Bumgarners did not say the f-word!) and then try to blame it on the other, which is ridiculous because with only two people in there, we both know exactly who did and didn't let one rip, even at only four and five years old. 

Anyway.

So it makes me kind of dumbly happy to see Nathan and Anneliese developing their own little bedtime patterns.  Not every night, but most nights, they (well, mostly Nathan) are quite insistent on going upstairs together, and it's hard to convince either one of them to get a move on without the sibling in tow.  (Now that we're encouraging Anneliese to get more places on her own instead of being carried as often, we move even more slowly than we did before, which I did not think was possible but apparently is.)

They gather themselves at the bottom of the stairs, look at each other and giggle, then do that some more, until I can't take it anymore (about twelve seconds) and I start herding them up.  They laugh the whole way.

I cannot for the life of me figure out what's so hilarious about crawling up the stairs together, but something is.  Maybe for Nathan it's that he's crawling instead of walking.  Maybe for Anneliese it's that she's clearly trying to race him, and he lets her win.  Every time. 

(At some point I'm going to tell her that her big brother might be the slowest person on the face of God's whole green earth, and it's not that impressive to beat him in any sort of race.  I won't burst her bubble just yet though.)

Regardless of motive or source of (lack of) hilarity, it does make me smile that they spend so many evenings where the last thing they do before they go to bed is have a minute of fun together. 

You know that sibling love... it gets me every time.