bed-time routines

1) I get home from work.
2) I drink a beer.
3) Discuss son's day at pre-school. Son explains all the kids he played with, what their names are, what trucks they had.
4) Wife and I eat.
5) Son argues with us about eating. Demands berries and only berries.
6) Wife and I cajole him into joining us at table.
7) Son consents to eating small amount of food. Gets small amount of berries.
8) Attempt to get son undressed.
9) Attempt to convince son to go to the bathroom.
10) Bathtime!
11) Attempt to get son dressed for bedtime.
12) Wife reads son book.
13) Wife and I brush son's teeth.
14) Wife lures dog out of bedroom.
15) I read son two or three books.
16) I turn out lights.
17) I set timer on iphone to 3 minutes.
18) Son plays with various ringtones on timer. "Want to listen to music", he says. Favorite is ringtone of Panacea's "Lowtech Outro" which he repeats over and over.
19) Timer goes off.
20) Son demands I "snuggle with him for one more minute".
21) I tuck him in and we snuggle for a minute.
22) I leave and if I am lucky he goes to bed. If I am not we dance around him coming out and going back in for 10 minutes asking for various things (water, pain meds, going to potty, etc) until he konks out.

I forgot:

11a) Put on soothing/jarring rain sounds.

Only one beer?

More beer doesn't make process go any faster I find.

- 7:15 PJs
- brush teeth
- couple of books
- kiss mama goodnight
- i tell them a "green lantern story" (how this started i can't remember; i know nothing about the green lantern so in my telling he's a normal guy who likes BLTs and doing the crossword and lives on the 6th floor of an apartment building in metropolis and is good friends with "the mayor" and his usual mode of transportation is to turn into a leaf and float on the breeze)
- a couple of songs if they're still awake
- JUST RECENTLY they have allowed me to leave if they're not actually asleep at this point
- it is now 7:45 or 8

- i have dinner w/my wife at around 8:30 or 9 depending on who's cooking

green lantern sounds like a cool dude

1) I get home from work.
2) I drink a beer.
3) Discuss son's day at pre-school. Son explains all the kids he played with, what their names are, what trucks they had.
4) Wife and I eat.
5) Son argues with us about eating. Demands berries and only berries.
6) Wife and I cajole him into joining us at table.
7) Son consents to eating small amount of food. Gets small amount of berries.
8) Attempt to get son undressed.
9) Attempt to convince son to go to the bathroom.
10) Bathtime!
11) Attempt to get son dressed for bedtime.
12) Wife reads son book.
13) Wife and I brush son's teeth.
14) Wife lures dog out of bedroom.
15) I read son two or three books.
16) I turn out lights.
17) I set timer on iphone to 3 minutes.
18) Son plays with various ringtones on timer. "Want to listen to music", he says. Favorite is ringtone of Panacea's "Lowtech Outro" which he repeats over and over.
19) Timer goes off.
20) Son demands I "snuggle with him for one more minute".
21) I tuck him in and we snuggle for a minute.
22) I leave and if I am lucky he goes to bed. If I am not we dance around him coming out and going back in for 10 minutes asking for various things (water, pain meds, going to potty, etc) until he konks out.

― One bad call from barely losing to (Alex in SF), Saturday, September 7, 2013 1:15 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is hilarious and matches almost everything i've seen in getting kids ages 2-8(?) to go to sleep!

- i tell them a "green lantern story" (how this started i can't remember; i know nothing about the green lantern so in my telling he's a normal guy who likes BLTs and doing the crossword and lives on the 6th floor of an apartment building in metropolis and is good friends with "the mayor"

I had a running series of collaborative, improvised stories with my mom about a character called "Pepsi Free." He had a whole cadre of friends, including one who had different "themes" for each week (for example, one week he might eat only green foods).

irl LOL at "Pepsi Free"

take outside to say goodnight to the sun, sky, earth, animals, etc.

I did this with my little girl when she woke up on Saturday (substituting good morning for good night). She liked it so much that on Sunday, she woke up crying because she wanted to say good morning to everything.

I've slipped back into getting home from work around 7:45-8 instead of the 6:45-7 I aim for, so the first hurdle (brush teeth, PJs, and upstairs) is usually taken care of by Pam.

I give them five minutes to settle down and then head up.
If it's bath night, I'll take care of that. We usually have music off my phone as they bathe. The Pretenders is a tradition... "It is time for me to wash all of your hair..." to the tune of "Stop Your Sobbing". Bathtime can be chaotic and fraught or it can pass without incident or protest, I never know what to expect.
Once in bed, I'll either improvise a silly story ("this one has to be nine paragraphs!" "No, eleven!" "Don't just say 'Once Upon A Time, The End'") or I'll read to them a chapter of whatever they're already reading (Nancy Drew and Lemony Snicket seem to be making a reappearance of late) and try to say good night.
But Wednesday is video night, when we forego the story/reading and they get to watch something on my phone. Ava, for some reason, loves Rosana Pansino's commentaries on Harry Potter Lego video games, but '40s/'50s Disney shorts and pop videos (Propaganda's P-Machinery and Sparks doing Mickey Mouse on SNL have been aired upteen times) and even My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (someone uploaded the entire 9 hours of one season as a single clip!) are favoured too.
Trying to extricate myself from their room post-video/story/book depends entirely on their mood (or, according to Pam, how much I rile them up). It can be 5min or 30min. Tucking in/cuddling can quickly escalate to piggy-backs and wrestling.
Ava has a reading light but we keep forgetting to set Lulu's up; Lulu always falls asleep first anyway, Ava is often awake reading way past 10.
There's usually half a dozen calling-down incidents 8:30-10: hunger, thirst, scared, lonely, "unfair", etc.

The last two nights nightmares have forced Lulu into our bed around 4am but it doesn't happen much these days. So glad we got through that period (2008-10) when one or both of them were in with us three nights out of every five.

we've started a new routine of just sitting in her room with her for 10 minutes once she goes to bed, then we leave the room. then i sit in the hallway outside her room with the door mostly closed, so she can see that i'm there but can't talk to me, until she's asleep. it's still kind of a pain but i'm considering it a move in the right direction. also i can play on my phone while she's falling asleep which makes it less boring. the first night we tried it she had a pretty epic tantrum but since then it's been pretty smooth.