Oops.

Since she was about six months old, our daughter has been sleeping on the lower floor of our house, in a room located at the exact opposite end of the house from the master bedroom. Her area of the house is closed off to keep the fur-bearing animals from hanging out there, so we're completely unable to hear her (and vice versa) at night. Like responsible modern parents, though, we keep tabs on her with a monitor -- in our case, a clunky and relatively inexpensive black and white model we found at a big box store that shall not be named. A. has always been a great sleeper, but sometimes in the middle of the night she loses track of her security blanket or gets tangled up in her sheets or -- more lately -- has a nightmare. In each of these scenarios, I usually tumble downstairs for a few moments and settle her down before bumbling back to bed. The monitor, of course, is useful for knowing when these sorts of problems are going on.

The monitor is a part of the daily routine -- turning it on at night is one of those reflexive things we do before collapsing for the evening, just like brushing our teeth or making sure the cats have enough food to keep them from fighting with each other all night.

So imagine my surprise when I woke up at 6:00 this morning and realized the monitor had somehow not been turned on before we fell asleep. The kid appeared fine on the screen -- the blanket seemed to be in place, and she appeared peaceful as usual. But I couldn't be sure what had happened over the previous nine hours, so when I retrieved A. from her bed a little while later, I casually began asking questions.

"So, um, did you sleep well?"

"Yes, I had a big nap."

"Good, good." I paused. "Um, did you sleep with Blankie all night?"

"Uh-huh."

"Excellent, excellent." My concerns begin to melt away, until --

"I cried."

Dammit. The problem here is that my daughter -- a clever, beautiful 2-year-old -- has also begun experimenting with The Lie. She tells us things that allegedly happened to her -- things that couldn't possibly have actually happened to her -- on a daily basis. She says things like, "Aiden pushed me," when in fact Aiden moved to another state well over five months ago and, barring astral projection, could not have pushed her anytime recently.

So when Audrey told me this morning that she cried in the middle of the night, we were trapped in the space created by my stupid error (i.e., forgetting to turn the monitor on) and her newly discovered talent for lying. The advantage here is all hers. If she did cry, then she's just learned a lesson about the unreliability of her father -- the one who usually attends to her mid-night needs. If she didn't wake up in tears at some point, she's nevertheless given me an enormous and likely-permanent psychiatric complex.

Well played, my child. Well played.

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