Our Dr. Seuss Home

Do you recognize this character?

No?

He's in the Dr. Seuss Book "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish." He's got a little ditty, it goes something like this:

My hat is old.
My teeth are gold.

I have a bird
I like to hold.

My shoe is off.
My foot is cold.

This little ditty came to me about 3 o'clock this morning as I lay in my daughter's bed, except instead it went like this:

My house is old.
My bed is cold.

I have a child
I like to hold.

I awoke last night realizing that Lindsey had crawled into bed with us at some point. It's not like we have a king-sized bed, it gets a little tight with three. When I tried to coax her into her own bed, she said it was cold and she wanted me to sleep with her to keep her warm.

So we went back to her room, and yes, her bed is freezing, even if her room isn't.

I lay next to her, trying to keep myself warm and figure out why her bed was so cold. Then I put my hand on the wall next to her bed. Brrrrr.

Our house was built in 1928, and more than likely it is insulated with newspapers, like most of our neighbors homes are. While fun and entertaining to read what the headlines were 82 years ago (if you care to take apart your walls to get at them), not so great for insulation.

Both my girls beds are up against an outside corner wall of our house, meaning that two sides of their beds are along two outside walls. So even though the air temp in the bedroom might not be cold, their beds are.

They both have flannel sheets which were put on their beds about a month ago, and I remembered the pile of pillows that had been lined up between Lindsey and her walls last year. Those pillows literally acted like the insulation that was absent from the walls, absorbing the cold so that the part of the bed she slept on was warm. Except we had purged many of those pillows, some of which were 20 years old (yuck). So now her insulation was gone.

The dog does a good job of keeping the girls warm, but he was sleeping in Marissa's bed this night.

So I was left with curling up with a 7-year-old tucked up against me like a kitten in the wee hours of the morning, hugging her to me and gazing at her childish profile in the soft blue light of the darkened room. Who needs insulation anyway?

As Dr. Seuss would say,

And now my story is all told.