Our New Game (Even Graham Gets to Play!)

The last couple of days, Elias has been asking me to play the Go To Sleep game with him. The way this works is this: we go to his room and he pretends to be the adult at bedtime, while I pretend to be him. He tells me to get into his bed (luckily he has a comfy queen sized bed so there's plenty of room for me and my constant companion Graham). After Graham and I climb into bed, I make a point of getting under the covers, "to keep warm" I tell Elias, since he is suspicious of covers and prefers to spend these cold Pennsylvania nights sprawled out on top of them, much to John's consternation. He turns out the lights and sits in a chair next to the bed to tell me a story, as John does when telling Elias his bedtime stories. A typical story goes something along the lines of "I'm going to tell you a story about trains. The train lives on the tracks. It goes clickety clack." If I ask for a song (usually John sings him a song before leaving the room), he'll sing something like, "Singing a song, song song song" or a version of Salty's song, "Yo ho ho and a bucket of goo, the tiller spins...".

The funny thing is that he doesn't use his normal voice to tell the stories. Instead, he does this cute, high-pitched mouse voice. He sings his songs in a breathy, tuneless falsetto. I don't know if these vocal stylings are supposed to be an homage to John or what, but they're very charming.

After finishing the song, he then tells me, "I'm going to sleep in the other bed" and gets up and leaves the room. I followed him once and found that he goes into my room and climbs into my bed, but usually Graham and I just lay in bed and enjoy the silence, a rarity in our house. A minute later, he comes back, turns on the lights and announces, "It's 3 o'clock! Time to wake up!" Then I get up and we play a different game.