"My mama says there aren't any zombies..."

We have officially moved into our new house, and consequently I am in a state of interior (and somewhat exterior) design frenzy.  Pictures quite likely to follow.

I was a bit worried before we moved in, because my son has never slept farther away from me than across a very small apartment, and our new house has a first-level master bedroom, with the other bedrooms upstairs.  For various reasons, my son will STILL get out of bed multiple times per night if we don't "check on him" every 10 minutes or so.  Now, granted, he usually falls asleep within 20 minutes of turning the lights off, but not always, which can be quite a battle.  And he sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night and comes to find us because he has nightmares or gets scared. 

He comes by his overactive imagination honestly, however. I'm the sort of person who still checks on my son before I leave in the morning just to make sure he's still there. And breathing (yes, I know SIDS doesn't apply to 8-year-olds.  He's not your son.).  I attempted to talk my husband into purchasing a baby monitor so I could hear it (and hopefully subsequently wake up...) if someone crawled through E's window and snatched him.  And I get anxious when he's playing at friends' houses, because I worry that he's left without telling anyone and he'll get stolen on the way home.  Luckily for me, I have a patient husband.  So all of us were prepared for some new nighttime worries. 

It started with the attic space.  In our new house, one walks past E's room down a hallway that leads to another bedroom, and at the beginning of this hallway is the first attic space, which is just a little closet under the roof in which we store all my seasonal decorating regalia.  The aforementioned bedroom has double doors in it that lead into the real attic space.  The first day in the house, before bedtime had even come up, E told me he was afraid to sleep upstairs, because he was scared that monsters were going to come of the attic.  Which is valid.  We discussed options to decrease the fear of said monsters, and luckily I happened to suggest chaining up the door handles.  He perked up like I'd just said Pikachu had come to town.  Thus followed a search for suitably thick chains, which were strung around the door handles in proper monster-deterring fashion.  And the first day passed, and the first night.

Well, then, the chains weren't enough.  We needed locks on the actual doors.  So my patient husband installed a lock on the attic door and no less than two locks on the crawlspace door (which, after all, is much closer to E's actual room, and therefore, monsters are more likely to emit from this entry rather than the one 20 feet down the hall).  This turned out to be a very good idea, because I discovered that when the windows in that bedroom-down-the-hall are open, a monster-like wind rushes through the room and throws open the attic door with a mighty bang.  I can just imagine how that would have gone over in the middle of the night.

A couple nights later, he refused to go upstairs by himself at night because he was positive that there was someone hiding behind the bathroom curtain.  Now this, I could not blame him for, because I am also plagued by this particular fear (thank you, college English teacher, for making me watch Psycho, you've scarred me for life).  My paranoia takes the form of tiptoeing into the bathroom and throwing back the shower curtain with some sort of weapon (hair dryer, slipper, etc) in my other hand.  It's worked for me so far. I am touched by the fact that my son apparently feels that I would be sufficient protection against someone creepy enough to get into our house and hide behind our shower curtain, especially since he thinks my mother is "too small" to protect him from tornados.  This fancy hasn't come up again, but I'm sure it won't be long...

The next time E's imagination was working overtime, he told D that GREMLINS, of all things, were going to crawl out of the air vent in his room and get him during the night.  I'm not sure how D handled this one, since I was on call and not available to stand gremlin watch, but the next morning there wasn't anything taped over the air vent and my child was un-gremlinized, so I'm fairly certain everything turned out ok.

Last night, I had placed E's First Communion rosaries on his bedside shelf (he sleeps in a bunkbed, so a table would have to be incredibly tall to be of any use), and when he crawled into bed, he asked me to say the rosary with him.  Thinking that it would help, after we said the rosary, I talked to him about Psalm 23 and the idea of being safe because God was with you, etc.  After turning out the lights, I checked on him a previously-agreed-upon amount of time later, and his face was pale and somewhat drawn.  To my query, he replied that he was scared.  "What's wrong?" I asked.  "What if I forget about God tonight and he sends gremlins out of my vent to get me?" 

I'm going to have to board up my entire upstairs, people.