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Hi friends, it's Cheryl and welcome to Sleep Tight Relax.
Before we listen to our story, let's get cozy and comfortable.
You can close your eyes if you like.
We're going to do a little deep breathing together.
Just slow, easy breaths.
You already know how to do this.
Your body does it all day without you even thinking about it.
Tonight, we're just going to do it on purpose.
Nice and slow and see how it feels.
But first, I want to tell you all about our story.
In our story, it's a rainy Saturday afternoon.
The kind of rain where the whole sky goes gray and the backyard looks like a pond and going outside is best left to the ducks.
The kind of afternoon, in other words, that is absolutely perfect for making things.
A girl named Victoria has been waiting for a day exactly like this.
She has cloth and paint and scissors and paper and a very important sketchbook ready with a cover she decorated herself.
She has a plan.
A good one.
She also has glue.
Now I want you to know that Victoria has this completely under control.
Mostly.
Before we find out what happens with the glue, let's just take a moment.
Right where you are, you already know how to breathe.
You've been doing it your whole life.
Tonight, we're just going to slow it down a little.
That's it.
Just slower.
Slower.
In through your nose, nice and slow, and out through your mouth.
Easy and steady.
Let's do that again.
In and out.
One more time.
In and out.
There you go.
Notice how that feels?
A little quieter maybe.
A little more settled.
That's yours.
Anytime the day feels too fast or too loud or just a little too gluey, you can always come back to that.
Just one slow breath, then another.
Okay, I think we're ready.
Let's go see how Victoria's afternoon is going in Victoria's Very Gluey Afternoon.
It was raining.
Not a little shower that stops and starts and spits and sneezes.
This was an all-afternoon, absolutely-not-going-anywhere kind of rain.
The sky was dark and the windows were streaky and the backyard looked like a green swimming pool that you can't swim in.
Victoria didn't mind.
She didn't mind at all.
She had been waiting for a day like this, collecting ideas for it, saving things up, stacking plans in the back of her head for weeks.
Weeks of school and after school and helping around the house and all those other activities that seemed to appear on the calendar, without her having any say in the matter whatsoever.
But today was Saturday and today it was raining.
And today, finally, was her day to make things.
She set her materials out across the kitchen table.
Cloth, paper markers, paint a canvas, her favorite sketchbook, which had a cover she had decorated herself and which she kept in a specific spot on her shelf so nothing would happen to it.
And the glue.
She put that one in the corner, where she could see it, which her mother had handed over with the particular look.
That meant be careful with that.
I know.
Victoria had said.
She pulled out her chair, sat down and stuck her tongue out the side of her mouth, which was simply what her brain required when it was working its hardest.
She looked at everything laid out in front of her.
She knew exactly what she was going to make.
What was that, dear?
Her mother called from the living room.
Victoria hadn't realized she'd said it out loud.
Nothing, Mom, just thinking about my art.
It's going to be really good, I think.
Hmm, I'll come check on you later.
Victoria looked toward the living room where her mother was already settled back into her book tea on the side table, feet tucked under her on the couch.
Sometimes when her mom read a book, she forgot when later was.
She turned back to the table.
That was fine.
This was her project.
She had it completely under control.
She started with the magazines.
There was a big stack of them in the recycling bin that her mother had said she could use, and she had already gone through them earlier in the week, dog earring the pages she wanted animals mostly, some flowers, a picture of a hot air balloon that she wasn't sure about yet, but she didn't want to leave behind.
She cut carefully.
She had her own scissors.
The good ones with the orange handles that were just hers and she knew how to use them.
Slow around the curves, steady on the straight parts.
She cut out a fox, and then a rabbit and then a bird she couldn't name but liked the color of, and she lined them up in a row at the top of the table where they couldn't get in the way.
Then she opened her paint.
Blue first, because blue was her color.
Not just any blue, her favorite blue, which she had figured out by mixing two others together and had been very pleased about ever since.
She painted flowers across the bottom of her canvas, big ones like she had seen once in a flower shop.
She held it up.
It was, she decided, really good.
Maybe the best flowers she had ever done.
She set it down to dry and looked at everything she had so far.
The fox and the rabbit and the unnamed bird in their row.
The canvas with the blue flowers.
The pieces of soft green cloth for the background, the page in her sketchbook where she had drawn the whole plan out in pencil three days ago and looked at every night before bed.
She was ready.
She picked up the pieces, one at a time, and arranged them on the table, moving them around, trying the fox on the left and then the right, putting the bird in the middle and then the corner.
Her tongue was all the way out now.
There, that was the arrangement.
All she had to do now was put it all together.
For that, she was going to need the glue.
She picked up the bottle.
White, orange pointy top, a little crusty around the tip the way glue bottles always got.
She picked at the crusty bit with her fingernail and pointed the tip at the edge of the cloth.
She was going to be very careful.
She squeezed.
Nothing came out.
She squeezed a little more.
Still nothing.
She pointed it closer and squeezed properly this time.
Glock!
And then before she could do anything about it, glop, glop, glop.
She pulled the bottle back, but her hand kept squeezing, the way hands do when they get a message a little too late.
And there was one more glop before she got it stopped.
There was a lot of glue on the cloth.
There was, she realized, quite a lot of glue on a lot of things.
She put one finger on the edge of the puddle to stop it spreading, which did not stop it spreading.
She reached for a scrap of paper to blot it, which stuck immediately to her finger.
She used her other hand to peel it off, which got glue on her other hand, and she put both hands flat on the table to steady herself while she thought.
That was a mistake.
She lifted her hands back up slowly.
The table came with them, just slightly, just enough.
She needed a paper towel.
She pushed back, her chair stood up, and that was when she found out about the floor a gluey footprint under her left foot.
She lifted it carefully.
The floor made a small sound.
She walked to the counter on her heels, which she felt was a reasonable solution.
The paper towels helped and then didn't.
One stuck to the cloth.
Another folded onto her wrist and stayed there.
She held her paper towel wrist up in the air, away from everything, and kept working with the other hand.
She was managing this was fine.
It was about that point that she heard the sound from the doorway.
Maybe not a sound exactly, more like a presence.
Her cat was sitting in the kitchen doorway, one paw tucked under, watching her, with the particular expression cats have when they have been watching for a while and have formed several opinions.
Its eyes moved slowly to her elbow, which was gluey and slightly shiny and had a small piece of the fox stuck to it.
It's fine, Victoria said.
The cat looked at the table. then at her hands, then back at her elbow.
I'm handling it.
The cat settled its chin onto its paw, which meant it was comfortable and planned to stay.
The puddle was smaller now, which was good, but the fox was on her sleeve.
The paper towel was on her wrist.
There were footprints on the floor and her sketchbook her good sketchbook, with the cover she had decorated herself had somehow moved to within one inch of the whole situation.
She had not moved it there.
She stared at it.
One inch.
She leaned in carefully and reached for the corner with two fingers the two she was most confident about and pulled it back an inch.
Another inch.
Far enough.
Her paper towel wrist came down on the edge of the canvas right across the bottom corner of the blue flowers, which were not entirely dry.
She lifted her wrist, paper towel fibers in the blue paint.
The flowers were fine, mostly.
But the corner wasn't and she had done that and her eyes went hot, which she had not been expecting.
She wasn't going to cry about glue.
She was not a person who cried about glue.
But it had been such a good plan and she had waited so long for this afternoon.
She stood up straight, took a breath.
Mom.
Silence.
Mom.
The sound of a book being set down.
Everything okay in there?
She looked at the table, at her hands, at the cat.
Um, she said, kind of.
Her mother appeared in the doorway in her reading socks, books still in hand.
She took in the kitchen the way mothers do.
One long, steady look from the table. to the floor, to Victoria's hands, to her sleeve, to the cat.
The cat looked back at her.
Her mother put her book on the counter and came back from the cupboard with a very large stack of paper towels.
She set them on the table, pulled off a sheet, handed it to Victoria and pulled off one for herself.
Table first, she said.
I'm sorry.
I squeezed too hard and then it just kept... I know how it goes.
I glued my hair to a science project in grade four.
Victoria stopped.
Your hair?
Right at the front.
20 minutes before I told anyone.
She looked up.
Did you move the sketchbook?
Yes.
Good.
The flowers are nice.
I mixed the blue myself from two other ones.
I can tell.
That's not a color that comes out of a bottle.
She peeled a dry drip off the table with her thumbnail.
We're nearly through it.
They worked quietly for a few minutes.
The paper towels piled up.
Her mother found the footprints and dealt with them without comment.
The cat watched until the interesting part was over. stretched, and left.
Her mother set the fox back at the top of the table.
Middle or side?
Left.
I tried both.
Left is right.
She picked up her book from the counter.
I'll get us some water.
Maybe we move the glue a little further from the sketchbook this time?
Yeah, Victoria said.
Probably a good idea.
Victoria picked up the glue bottle, put her hand flat on the table, well away from everything that mattered, and squeezed.
A perfect, small, entirely reasonable amount of glue came out.
She pressed the cloth to the canvas and counted to ten.
It held.
The fox went on the left, the rabbit beside him.
The bird she couldn't name went in the upper corner, which she hadn't planned but turned out to be exactly right.
She held it up.
It was really good, better than she'd pictured, which didn't always happen.
Her mother came back, set a glass of water by Victoria's elbow and looked at the canvas over her shoulder.
That's a really good idea.
I know, Victoria said, and then caught herself.
I mean, thank you.
Her mother sat down at the table not in the living room right there with her tea and her reading socks and her finger still in the page she hadn't gotten back to.
Victoria opened her sketchbook to the next blank page.
Her tongue came out of the side of her mouth.
Outside, the rain kept coming down, steady and settled.
The kitchen smelled like paint and paper and just slightly like glue.
The cat came back and sat in the doorway.
Her mother turned a page.
Victoria drew.
The afternoon went on, quiet and slow, and exactly what she had been waiting for.
And if it had gone a little differently than she'd planned, well...
Some afternoons were like that.
The best ones sometimes were.
Time to rest now.
Let your body go heavy.
Let your eyes stay closed.
Take a few deep breaths if you like.
Victoria had a plan today.
A really good one.
She'd been thinking about it for weeks.
And then things got a little gluey.
The paper towel stuck to her hands.
The footprints got on the floor.
The corner of the painting got a bit crumpled.
It didn't go perfectly, but she kept going.
She asked for help when she needed it.
She moved the sketchbook out of the way just in time.
And at the end of the afternoon, she held up something she had made.
Something with a fox on the left, just where she wanted him.
Any bird in the corner she hadn't planned, but turned out to be exactly right.
Better than she'd pictured, actually.
Things don't have to go perfectly to turn out really well.
Sometimes the gluey messy paper, towel stuck to your wrist parts are just what happens on the way to making something you're proud of.
Whisper this to yourself, soft as you like.
It's okay if things get messy.
I can ask for help.
I can keep going anyway.
Somewhere a cat is sitting in a kitchen doorway watching everything with great patience.
A sketchbook with a decorated cover is safe on a shelf.
And a painting, fox on the left, bird in the corner, is drying quietly.
And you, brave enough to try, smart enough to ask for help, are right where you belong.
You are calm, relaxed, and peaceful.
Good night.
Sleep tight.
Thank you.
Thank you. you
