A Bedtime Routine

I suspect that, when I look back on my kids’ childhoods once they’ve grown, their nightly bedtime ritual will carry some of the heaviest nostalgic weight.

As much as I’d like to remember it as a beautiful and peaceful time, when all the craziness of our hectic days gives way to a calming and intentional evening … that’s just not how it is. It’s much more fraught than that: there are the protestations, the procrastinations, the shoddy excuses for teeth-brushing, the insistence on one more chapter of a book or one more episode of a TV show, the pleading for a bedtime story and the subsequent fits of rage when demands for story aren’t acquiesced to, and countless other obstruction and distraction techniques … that, quite frankly, sometimes - even often - make bedtime a bit of a, well, nightmare.

Then, on top of the sometimes-challengeng events themselves, are the expectations of what an ideal bedtime should be like: shouldn’t I really be looking forward to and appreciating it? … versus the reality of the situation and the fact that I just want to put it behind me so I can lie in bed and stare mindlessly at my phone, or the wall, or Season 2 of Lost … and you can see how that just compounds the whole fraught nature of bedtime.

Regardless of whether these challenges are idiosyncratic to me and my family, your kid’s bedtime routine is still one worth capturing. (I’m sure I’ll miss it when they lock themselves in their separate rooms with their iPhone 23(-ish ) and I won’t know if they decide to go to bed or stay up all night.). So for now, I write about it. What does the timeline look like? What are the activities you do together? What and how do they protest? What are their unique little quirks that make bedtime fun or annoying-as-heck or both? What do you do when it’s all over, they’re finally in bed and you might finally have some non-work-non-kid time to yourself?