Monday Memory...the beaded curtain

We lived in Savannah, Georgia for 17 years. Our children grew up there and it's amazing to me how many stories I didn't know till they grew up and started reminiscing about their childhood.

Slowly some of their erratic behaviour began to make sense. We lived in a three bedroom home. We had two girls and one boy so it only made sense that the girls share a bedroom and the boy got his own bedroom. When the children were small we had the younger two in bunk beds in the same room giving Becky (our oldest) her own bedroom for a brief time.

When the time came for the girls to share the bedroom Becky told her brother ( about 8 at the time) that if any burglars broke in during the night that his bedroom was the first one they would go into and he would most likely be killed. Shortly after this big reveal we noticed that our son would sneak into our bedroom in the middle of the night and sleep on the floor by our bed. I would invariably almost step on him on my way to the bathroom.

Having no idea that his older sister had implanted this thought into his young impressionable mind Mr. Wonderful started locking him out of our bedroom. The next morning we would find him asleep on the floor between his sisters' beds. They soon tired of finding Andy on their floor and found navigating around him in the middle of the night to be just as cumbersome so they also began to lock him out of their bedroom at night.

We would then find Boy Wonder asleep on the floor in the hallway between both bedrooms. Mr. Wonderful tried talking to him to find out why he wouldn't sleep in his bedroom during the night but to no avail.

One Saturday Mr. Wonderful and Suzy went to local garage sales (their favorite father-daughter bonding time together) and came back with a beaded curtain. Boy Wonder claimed it immediately and made Dad put it over his doorway that same day. It would rattle every time you went in or out of his bedroom.

We discovered years later that it was Andy's burglar alarm. He decided that if he heard the beads rattle in the night that it would mean that a burglar was coming to his room. It would give him enough warning that he could jump out the window or scream for help!

The rattling beads was enough to let him sleep peacefully in his bedroom every night afterwards. Who knew that a few strings of beads hanging over the door way would provide security and a good night's rest?

(Side note: Older sister Becky disavows any memory of this incident!)

Did your children have monsters under their beds or night terrors? How did you handle them?