And then there was Light...

Autumn is not afraid of many things. Bugs? Nah, she likes to try to catch them. She didn't flinch at the thought of holding a fish. When pushing her in a swing the only thing she asks is to go higher and higher. She's been dunking her head under water in the bath tub for months.

So what is my three year old's kryptonite? The dark. She is terrified of being in the dark. Unless a room is fully lit she is not setting foot inside it. So you can imagine how much fun bedtime is.

We had finally gotten Autumn's bedtime routine under control when this fear of being in the dark emerged. At first I thought it was another stall tactic, until I realized that even when it was not Autumn's bedtime she wasn't setting foot into her room unless the light was on. We tried leaving the bathroom light on so that some would filter into Autumn's room and then turning the light off once she had (finally) fallen asleep. The problem, Autumn often wakes up in the middle of the night and gets terrified when she realizes the light has been turned off. So our next step was to make the obvious purchase - a night light.

To date we have been through four different night lights. For various reasons Autumn disapproved of each one. Sure, they are fun to look at during the day, but at night they did not suffice. So we went to Plan C - our last resort - keeping Autumn's bedroom lamp on all night long. This was not the end result I had been hoping for but it keeps her asleep in her own bed and not screaming waking us up in the middle of the night.

I have no idea how she is able to sleep in a fully lit room, but she does. Like a rock. So I'm not going to complain. We did make sure there was an eco-friendly light bulb with 1,256,876 available hours of light in that lamp.

I have my fingers crossed that she grows out of this before college.