The Toy Fairy

6:28 a.m.: "There's a sad sort of clanging from the clock in the hall and the bells in the stee-bo too. And up in the nursery an absurd little bird, is popping out to say cuck-oo CUCK-OO!" (This goes on until the entire song is over, and she begins again.)

6:34 a.m.: In tones of fear and possible pain: "MOMMY!" I rush upstairs and Berit says, trembling, "Mom-sob-my, last sob night I forgot sob to clean the toys and sob the Toy Fairy came and SOB took them all AWAY!"

So... the Toy Fairy. I have left her out of the blog because after the whole bathtub incident I didn't need another notch in my trunk of bad parenting. However, as I'm now kind of convinced that the girls will be having Toy Fairy conversations with their husbands someday (as in, "I truly feared this horrible creature and isn't it just like my MOTHER to make her up just to scare me??"), I'd like to explain myself.

The Toy Fairy is much like the Tooth Fairy, except she's evil and mean and scary and instead of leaving money for your hard-won baby teeth, she takes your toys away.

Ahem.

I don't remember inventing the Toy Fairy. Maybe Trevor did. Yes! He must have! He doesn't read the blog, let's blame it on him. But to be a little fair, I have a horrible memory, so I probably could have done it in a frantic moment and have shoved it deep into the bottomless file in my brain marked: "Necessary Parenting Strategies To Ensure Survival And/Or Sanity."

Anyway, the basic idea of the Toy Fairy is that she comes at night to take your toys if you haven't cleaned them up before bed. And since bedtime is meltdown time for Berit, but we also insist on our children's help in cleaning up their toys, at times scare tactics are needed. Enter the Toy Fairy.

When children leave their toys out overnight, the Toy Fairy sees that they don't really appreciate what they have and swoops in to shove them in her big toy bag and deliver them to children who will take care of them.

I have often thought about attaching a guilt factor here as well, like, "There are children who don't have ANY toys and you have so many even I can't count that high, so maybe you should feel badly for making such a mess with the toys you don't even care enough about to clean." But that's probably going too far.

I would have probably forgotten about the Toy Fairy altogether after her first use, except Berit clung to the idea instantly and now asks about her when it's time to clean up before bed and before vacuuming. (When it's vacuuming time she screams and cries in terror that the toys aren't sufficiently cleaned when they're just up on the shelves and couch.)

So I indulge a bit in the Toy Fairy, and now she's having nightmares about her. I wonder if she's wearing Berit's dress-up clothes in the dreams? Is she riding in on Berit's toy ponies? Maybe in the dollhouse minivan? Does she use Berit's fairy wands, and ride the tiny carousel when Berit's sleeping, hoping that tomorrow night Berit forgets to put it away and she can claim it for herself?

You see, I can take this places. It might be wrong, but my living room is clean.