I feel like I was a pretty helpful kid. I always wanted to assist in the kitchen, I could open any door, locked or not, and I was especially good at cleaning the fish tank. Now, you might be saying to yourself, “Those sound like fairly ordinary tasks,” until I tell you that I did them all while sleepwalking.

My parents were always finding me out of bed, up to something. So much so that they put a safety gate to keep me in my bedroom. They caught me playing with the knobs on the stove and more than once, they caught me trying to leave a hotel room. But the strangest sleepwalking incident I ever had was with my fish tank.

My brother and I shared a room, and between our beds there was a nightstand with a fish tank on it. One morning, I woke up, and you know how just as you wake up, sometimes you remember a dream. I dreamt that I had stuffed my entire bedspread into the fish tank. And as I tried to blink the sleep out of my eyes, I slowly turned to the tank. And there it was. My entire bedspread was in fact stuffed in the fish tank. It was a bit of a mess to clean up, as you might imagine, and, well, I probably don’t have to tell you that a school of neon tetras did not make it through the ordeal.

I was thinking of these old sleepwalking incidents, because the other night, just as Kim and I had settled down to sleep, we heard the sound of little footsteps coming down the hall. As the girls have gotten older, it has become less frequent that they come down during the night, so when they do now, there is usually a reason. The door opens, and Maddy pops in. She says hi and comes over to my side of the bed and begins to make herself comfortable snuggling in with me. I gave her a hug and asked what she needed. She didn’t really respond, so I told her that it was the middle of the night and that she should go back to her bed. She said she needed to use the bathroom, so she went to our bathroom, and came back out. She had left the light on, so I asked her to turn it off, which she cheerfully did, then she gave me a kiss, trotted around to Kim, gave her a kiss, and then left our room, closed the door, and went back to her bedroom. We didn’t hear from her again until the morning.

Over breakfast, we asked her why she had come down during the night. She looked at us like we were nuts. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to either Kim or me that she had been sleepwalking. She was insistent that it hadn’t been her, but that Abby must have been who we saw. We are certain that it was Maddy, and now we know that she’s a sleepwalker like me.

Fortunately, we don’t have a fish tank in the house, and after the cold nights this week, I don’t think we could have spared a bedspread. With the coldest weather since January, we hope all of your plants made it through ok. There was a little frost in one spot of our yard, but otherwise our garden looks like it is actually enjoying the cooler weather; I know we are. A fire in the fireplace and a mug of hot cocoa feel a little silly when it is 85 degrees outside. This week, they are just right. I think we need to enjoy it while it lasts.