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Saturday, March 20, 2010

Don't Let The Bedbugs Bite!

Scarlett hates going to bed. She can be an eye-rubbing, falling-down exhausted, emotion-spewing mess and still fight sleep like a rabid little tiger. What’s up with that? I spend most of my life either fervently hoping I can fall asleep or desperately wishing I could stay asleep, and Scarlett, like every kid ever known, avoids it like the plague. We just don’t appreciate what we’ve got until it’s gone, I guess. Sleeping has reached such mythic proportions in my life that I have actually dreamed about sleeping. Sad, but true. I saw a snippet of poem waxing rhapsodic about sleep on a half-torn magazine page once and it captivated me so completely that I had to track down its origin and author. When I finally found all of 19th century poet and humorist Thomas Hood’s ode--”O bed! O bed! delicious bed! That heaven upon earth to the weary head!"--I realized that I love him almost as much as I covet naps. He just gets it. The authors of kid books must get it, too, because it seems that time-to-go-to-bed stories are rivaled only by time-to-use-the-potty tales for sheer numbers. In Leigh Hope Wood’s Sleep Tight, Roosevelt Rhino, the two-horned little protagonist gets very tired during his busy day of trains and teddy bears but, in true kid fashion, needs routine and his parents to find his way to the Land of Nod. O bed, I’m sorry for those childhood years of playing hard to get! Can you ever forgive me?


http://openlibrary.org/b/OL12327020M/Sleep_Tight_Roosevelt_Rhino


http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/315582.Leigh_Hope_Wood

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