Baby life has become Paranormal Activity

I added a couple of outdoor cameras indoors. Well, only temporarily indoors. We wanted something to watch over baby and it’s been too freakin’ cold to run the wiring, so at the moment baby has a Foscam outdoor POE IP cam pointed in her direction, and there’s a Foscam dome camera sitting in the living room that seems to exist only to capture cat butts as they stroll in front of it.

And Maggie’s seeing ghosts and I’m smelling burning hair. I probably should have lead with that statement. Makes it creepier.

There’s something about seeing your kiddos open their eyes and have the green hellish glow of IR reflected off of them to give you a jolt in the late nights / early morning. And these cameras offer no flattering less creepy angles just due to where I had to position them.

Anyway, this happened yesterday:

Before I went to bed I decided to check out downstairs one more time, forgot I’d stashed one of the Halloween decorations on the wall of sharp things near the dryer. I didn’t sleep much that night after that.

The next morning Kim has a talk with her. Her conversation with Maggie indicates that the thing she saw scared her and has a different name (also sounds like a chipmunk) and is a boy that looks like a girl.

Both have nice eyes and pretty hair. I’m thinking Desire and Death of the Endless in my head

Kim spent the day with Maggie on unrelated reasons, decided maybe she remembered Death from the Dickens Christmas thing we went to and posed with it. Not what she described, and I don’t know if we even mentioned it was supposed to be anything other than the Ghost of Christmas Future.

I pretty much narrowed the times I smelled the smell to when the temperature got below freezing and the gas kicked on. Thinking we had some cat hair manage to migrate that way.

2am last night Aerin wakes up. I try and tiptoe down the stairs to get her a bottle. I plug her up and sit next to the crib while she’s sleep eating. Next to the crib is my computer these days so I poked around trying to get my MP3s to work in PlayOn. For some reason when I launch the settings it forces the Foscam camera app open, I usually run that in the background.

I see the Eye of Sauron looking at me and it freaks me out.

Oh wait, it’s that camera in the living room and it’s upside down for a minute and no, that’s a cat’s butt. (insert picture of cat’s butt here if I ever take one)

Baby finished the bottle, demanded more, I went back down, got her another 4, she pounded that to .5 oz left and passed out.

That’s when Maggie woke again. I sent Kim to handle her, same old, ghosts, monsters, etc.

Cut to today

It’s been five days since the ghosts, burning smell, etc hit. I don’t think I’ve slept a night fully since. Kim burned some sage and wandered around the house with Maggie telling the ghosts to go away.

We decided to address her fears as opposed to trying to convince a 2.75 year old that what she believes is scaring her are her imagination or dreams. To be clear: we tried to, using words she knows, inform her that there was nothing to be afraid of.

When attempting to educate her on the merits of why a spirit would hang out in her room and was only visible right after she woke up failed, we switched to plan B. Witchcraft. Well, actually not witchcraft, but old folk remedies that made it looks like we were taking her fears very seriously and doing something to address them while not actually making anything more secure.

Sort of like the insert government agency here.

Maggie slept that night but Aerin was a cranker.

The next night Aerin slept but I didn’t

Last night Maggie woke up and was sitting with bags under her eyes at 3am. I came down and asked her what was wrong and it was a shadow that was scaring her. I turned out a light and the shadow went away, she went back to sleep.

When I laid down Aerin started grunting, but went back to sleep a bit after, and then got up at 4 and proceeded to sing the songs of her people and try and tapdance.

I hate swaddling, I really do, but after about 40 minutes of happy baby at 4am I resorted to that.

After getting the kids off to daycare I passed out for a couple of hours, wandered off without my phone to work…

I’ve been so tired lately I’m pretty sure I’m seeing Maggie’s ghosts now.