Blue Dad

Our Caitlin is a toucher. When she was a little baby sharing our bed she would always scoot around until her feet or her hands touched someone and then she would feel comforted enough to settle down. She particularly liked to hold hands. Ashley too was a toucher when she shared our bed. She liked to burrow her hand up the sleeve of our clothes so that she could hold the area in the crease of our elbow. She continued to find this comforting when she was transferred to her little bed right next to out king size bed.

The girls eventually moved to our second bedroom last summer. It had been our guest bedroom and my study and had a sofa bed. We decided that they could just use the sofa bed and some day we may turn it into a “children’s bedroom”. It’s still the guest room when family visits and the girls love that they get to camp on our bedroom floor, in their sleeping bags and the air mattress, when Grandma and Granddad visit.

Once in their own big bed Ashley and Caitlin continued to snuggle up to each other, deriving comfort from each others’ touch instead of from Mum and Dad. This all worked nicely for about a year. Then while we were in France this summer (the girls shared a sofa bed there too) we noticed that Ashley was becoming irritated with Caitlin touching her. Since then bedtime started to involve a lot of frustration and tears and many attempts to teach Caitlin to hold her teddy instead of touching Ashley. But even when her hands were occupied with teddy her feet would stray across the bed to make contact with her sister. Once they fell asleep they still snuggled up to each other and if one left the bed during the night for any reason the other would often wake up wanting her sister to return. So they obviously still wanted to be in bed together.

I tried to explain to Ashley how much Caitlin loved her and compared the comfort Caitlin received from Ashley to the comfort Ashley received from her teddy. Ashley tried so hard to understand and showed so much patience when she would ask Caitlin to stop touching her as they lay in bed. Eventually though she cracked and one morning in bed she despairingly cried, with tears in her eyes, “I don’t want to be Caitlin’s teddy!” We were starting to brainstorm ways to convert the girls room potentially with separate beds. And then James had a brain wave.

I had just pulled our big blue body pillow out of storage to give to the thrift store (I had bought it when pregnant and never really used it). James decided that this would be their Dad substitute and it would lie between them while they were falling asleep so that Caitlin would not be able to touch Ashley. It is too long for Caitlin to work her way around it with her feet and the girls both snuggle up to it to fall asleep. They have dubbed it, “Blue Dad”. They will even protest at night if we forget to put it between them. After a couple of months of this have started removing it once they fall asleep because the bed is getting a bit cramped. This way they can fall asleep without touching each other and then when they are asleep they can eventually find each other in the bed and snuggle. The problem is solved.

Ashley happily peeking over Blue Dad a few nights after it joined their bed