The girls went upstairs to bed, and within a few minutes I could hear shrieks of dismay. “Give me my book!” “I don’t want to listen to the Wiggles!” “I can’t find any pajamas!”

I think we need to do something about bedtime again. I know that having a routine is key, especially for young children. But we seem to change our routine every few months or so, either because it isn’t working or because we’ve stopped using the routine we’d intended to use.

When the girls were babies, we didn’t worry about their bedtimes much. We based their routines more around ours.  But now that they’re in school and daycare, going to bed and going to sleep is more important.

We instituted an 8:00 p.m. bedtime at first, but found that with all of us getting home around 5:30 p.m., we’d just have time to eat dinner and do homework and chores and then it would be bedtime. We didn’t have time to just be together, so we changed bedtime to 8:30 p.m.  Everyone is used to that now; we don’t have arguments about going upstairs to bed.

But we don’t really have a positive routine in place. We were reading stories for a while, but got out of the habit at some point, perhaps when we had too many evening meetings.  And, I have to admit, it’s also because we as parents can be selfish. We don’t want to go read stories if we’re in the middle of a TV show, or a blog post. We don’t want to go upstairs and come back down again.

Foolish parents.  So it’s back to the drawing board. How do we put a 10-year-old, a 7-year-old, and a 4-year-old to bed peacefully, and still have some time for ourselves?

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