bedtime routine

Want to know about our bedtime routine?  Okay.  First, a little background. We wanted bed time to be special.  We wanted to say family prayers.  We wanted time to chat with our kids, to work out any kinks in the day, to talk about God.  We wanted to read beautiful literature to them before bed, we wanted them to read to themselves for a while. We sang and read to our little ones, and  I nursed them to sleep.

Of course, along with that were all the regular things, family prayers, bedtime snack, tooth brushing, jammies, swatting each other on the backside with towels and some potty humour and general gigglefest fun that inevitably happens at bedtime.  

In short, we wanted our children to go to bed with the good, the true and the beautiful on their minds. Once we were at the point of juggling three or four kids, bedtime was taking quite a while, as you can imagine with the aforementioned ideals in mind.

Lofty ideals, unrealistic ideals?  Maybe.  But ideals they were.  And we intended to reach for them.  Then we started to get cranky.  Bedtime was taking too long.  After a few months of getting cranky and resentful about the length of time that bedtime was taking, we needed to revisit the bedtime quandary.

So Sparky and I, we discussed it.  What can we pare down, what can we eliminate, what can we Do, to make bedtime a shorter deal.  We want to pray together.  We want to read good literature to our children.  We want to talk about their day.  We want to answer their important questions.  We want to talk about God and we want to sing and snuggle.

It was such a lame conversation.  Well we can’t cut out prayer.  Duh.  What about beautiful literature? Uh, no.  What about talking about God?  What about all those little questions and problems that come up during the day that surface at bedtime?  What about singing, what about snuggling?

Nope, nope, nope, we wanted to do all those things.  These are the gifts we wanted our kids to have.
So, the upshot of all that…bedtime takes time at our house.  It is a choice.  It could be short and snappy and we could have the evening to ourselves.   So, we don’t want to adjust the bedtime routine, so, we have to adjust us.

At our house, bedtime takes time.  Lots of it.  We pray together.  We have a snack and chat talk about what we are doing tomorrow or this weekend.  Or Sparky tell us about what he heard on EWTN.

Then Sparky brushes the boys teeth while they goof off.  I brush Rosebud and clean marker off her face.  She asks me important questions by the dozens such as why did God make us out of cells and not something else. Then I read her stories while Sparky reads to the boys. They turn the eggs in the incubator (yes, it is in their bedroom) and sing the praises of poultry.  I pray and snuggle Rosebud and type my blog and sing while she is going off to sleep.  Sparky prays and fields questions, illustrations and comments about God and Life and Poultry for a long time.

I go downstairs to the cozy living room.  Then Sparky comes down.  We talk about our kids  Then our big kids notice us sitting quietly together.  This seems to have a magnetic impulse for them.  They must join us.

Maybe they think we’re lonely.

And so, in recent years, an addition to the bedtime routine includes banter and philosophy and problem solving with big people. Except on date nights.  Then we tell them to go to bed, it’s date night.

Then they go and we eat cheesecake on the couch.  Which, by the way, no one else is allowed to do.

Small perk.