It seems we have reached the night-terrors phase.

At around 3 this morning Elizabeth screamed, as in damsel in a horror movie screamed. Attentive parents that we are we naturally leapt out of bed and ran to her – no jokes, we live in an area with many venomous snakes, and one regularly hears of people, and especially children, being bitten by a snake in their bed, so naturally we assumed the worst.

When we got to her she kept saying “fork, fork” inbetween sobs – fork is currently her word for anything sharp, which only increased our fears. While the wife held her I took all her bedding and mattress out of her cot, but nothing there, and we couldn’t see any bite or sting marks on her skin, so assumed it was just a bad dream.

So I lay waiting the next two hours for my alarm to go off with the Minion’s feet in my kidneys (not taking chances on invisible snakes we took her to our bed where she promptly decided lying in a position perpendicular to us was most comfortable).

Come morning the missus takes her to her room to get dressed, and she start speaking of the fork again, except now it sounds more like pig (if you’re horribly confused right now, the Afrikaans words for fork and pig differ by only one syllable – “vurk” vs “vark”). Apparently a pig was trying to smell her, and she wasn’t having any of that.

(Your guess is as good as mine where she got the idea of a pig sniffing her – the only pigs to which she has regular exposure is one with a last name Bank and another with a first name Peppa…)

Anyway, come bedtime all goes well – getting dressed, storytime, the regular routine. Until the wife tries to leave the room. Total hysterics. The pig mustn’t smell her. She wants to sleep in our bed. She wants us to stay with her.

Apparently this is a phase they go through, which means it will pass (hopefully soon). Pigs, though? Wherever did she get that one?

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