"Waaaaah! The beanstalk get me!"

A couple minutes after putting Alice to bed via the normal routine of bath and books, we heard some intense wailing coming from her room.  She was crying out, "The beanstalk get me!" over and over again.

This morning, instead of watching a Thomas video, Zac had Alice watch an old Mickey Mouse episode that was the story of the magic beanstalk. In the cartoon, the bean seeds fell through a crack on the floor and while everyone was sleeping, a ray of light from the moon inspired the magic stalk to grow. It carried their beds up through the sky to the giant's castle in the clouds. On the journey upwards, their beds fell apart. Alice was particularly interested in that part and kept asking, "What happened Mickey's bed?"

We hadn't talked about the cartoon all day and Alice didn't mention it. But when she was laying in her bed, she evidently remembered the beds being carried up into the sky and breaking apart.

To calm her down, Zac repeated the last part of the bedtime routine by reading her some more books.  Then she came out to give Simon and me a kiss.  But when he tried to put her in her bed, she needed to come out and give us a kiss again. (Were these not the normal goodnight kisses but actually goodbye kisses in her mind?)

The next tactic was for me to sit on the floor next to her crib and talk to her for a while.  I explained that we didn't have any been seeds.  There was no hole in the floor. We had to talk about that for a while.

We eventually got her to go back to sleep--with the light on.

Zac and I thought the whole incident was hilarious, but we will definitely be more cautious about what we let her watch.