Rain, rain, go away!

The other night when I went into the girls' room to check on some nighttime problems, I noticed that Rachel's blanket was wet...with droplets of water. She assured me she hadn't wet the bed and I believed her because wetting the bed doesn't usually leave droplets of water on the top of your quilt. Neither of us could think of a good answer, it being the middle of the night and all, so we decided to just ignore it and go back to sleep. Whatever had originally woken Rachel up had been taken care of and the water was a minor wasn't weighing on my mind as much as getting back into bed was.

In the morning, Rachel said, "Mom, I think I know how my blanket got wet last night."

"Oh, really?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said. "It's a pretty easy answer—it's been raining in my room at night."

"You know that it doesn't rain in the house, right?"

"Well, yes, but I have felt it rain in my room at night and come look at this!"

She took me into her bedroom and showed me some condensation on her windows.

"See? It really has been raining in my room. I know it's weird but it's happening."

"That's just condensation," I told her, "Probably from the humidifier."

"It is raining in my room," she insisted. "Just come and stay in my room all night and that way you'll know right when it starts raining. I don't know how it happens but it does!"

A simple...and altogether terrible...solution. I told her I would get to the bottom of it.

So last night before Andrew and I went to bed I went into the girls' room to see if it had started raining yet. The humidifier had already been running for a few hours so I went to feel Rachel's blankets. They were a little wet.

I climbed onto her bed and touched the ceiling. It was also a little wet. Wet enough that little water droplets were forming and dripping onto her.

So it has been raining in her room.

The condensation seems only to gather where the ceiling's already had some moisture damage—along what Rachel used to call the "ghost line" on her ceiling. The girls have been sick and coughing for so long that I think they still need the humidifier in there but we decided we could turn it off before we went to bed instead of having it run until it shuts off automatically (whenever that is). Hopefully that will lessen the frequency of Rachel's nighttime downpours because she refuses to sleep with her door open so the steam just gets trapped in her room...