Bedtime Is For Suckers

People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one. ~Leo J. Burke

Our kids share a room and I hate it. It's taken what should be a fairly easy process (or easier than it has been) and made it the bane of my day.

Before Maureen was born, Johnny was fighting bedtime so much that I went to the bookstore in desperation and came home with this book: The No-Cry Sleep Solution For Toddlers and Preschoolers by Elizabeth Pantley. It has become my second Bible.

I'm not a cry-it-out kind of girl, so this gentle approach to creating and upholding a soothing bedtime routine was a life saver. We had the basic idea right, but Pantley's advice helped us tweak a few things so Johnny went to bed easier, fell asleep faster, and stayed that way.

When he started waking in the middle of the night and coming into our bed, we used the book again to cure him of his midnight wanderings.

Bedtime was going along quite smashingly until the time change. You know, three months ago. It's only an hour, but it made such a big difference and not in a good way. I attribute much of the problem to the lack of daylight, and the colder temperatures, because we can't get outside as much. In the summer, we quite often go for a walk after dinner, but when it's dark before 5, post-meal exercise isn't an option. And since our house is small, there's only so much running a jumping you can do.

So I pulled out the book again, but this time it seemed to point out that a lot of the problems with bedtime were related to the fact that Maureen and Johnny share a room. She's older now, more aware, more capable of making her own noise, and the room sharing is just not working. When bedtime rolls around, here are our choices.

Scenario One: Keep baby up past the time when she is tired so both kids can go to bed at the same time. If we're lucky, both kids are tired and both kids go to sleep fairly quickly. The other 99.999% of the time, the preschooler is not interested in going to sleep, so he jumps on his bed and/or climbs into the crib with his sister and/or repeatedly goes in and out of the room, slamming the door each time. The poor, exhausted baby is unable to go to sleep, what with all the racket and all, so she ends up a crying, snot-nosed, red-eyed mess.

Scenario Two: Put the baby down when she is tired. Perform bedtime routine with preschooler in another part of the house. Then, after repeated admonistions to not wake the baby, tiptoe into kids room and put preschooler in bed. Shush him. Cover him up. Hiss a warning not to wake the baby up. Seriously consider putting my hand over his mouth when he starts to whine. When he inevitably wakes her up, lose my patience and get angry.

Scenario Three: Put the baby to sleep when she's ready. Perform bedtime routine with the preschooler in another part of the house, then lay down with him in our bed. When he's asleep, move him to his own bed.

The scenario that seems to work best, unless we've had an extremely busy day, is scenario three. It does mean we have to lie down with him, but I'm usually tired and could use a little break anyway, and he has been falling asleep quickly. We also took the advice from Pantley's book and removed baths from the bedtime routine because it's not soothing for Johnny, he splashes and has such a blast that he ends up wired and not at all ready for bed.

The days are getting longer, although not much warmer (yet), and I'm very much looking forward to being able to get outside for fresh air and exercise. I'm looking foward to a larger house with more bedrooms even more.