Goodnights

The end of the days always prove interesting in our house. I both love and dread this part of the day. We have a schedule that we follow each night to help with the transition from playtime to dinnertime to finally bedtime.

We start at about 5PM where we attempt to have dinner. And really dinner typically consists of demands for more milk or juice, napkins, call backs to the table and maybe a few mouthfuls of food and finally clearing the table. After the table is cleared if it is a tub night we head into the bathroom and empty out the plastic container full of boats, ducks, fish and other various plastic sea life creatures into the tub while it fills with water. If it isn't a tub night, we head in there armed with a washcloth and towel to at least scrape a few layers of dirt off the hands, face and in the summer the black bottomed feet. If it is tub night we put the girls in and in case you think that bathing them together is wrong, we have tried it separately and wound up with the dry kid wet again....so it's tubs for two for the children in our house.

After tubs or cleanup we put on their pajamas or in our house 'jamas. For Nicole this is an easy task for picking out the pjs, we do it for her. The hard part is trying to put the diaper on. It takes a few flips onto the stomach and back again and we can typically get it on. I have found that giving her a wipe to use on her hands and face will entertain her just long enough to get her diaper on. Typically just enough time before she attempts to put the wipe into her mouth. I know I should find a better toy for the top of the changing table, but I haven't as of yet.

Getting Aimee's pjs on is a bit tougher. Depending on her mood, this could be quick and easy or long and whiny. We have four different sets of summer pjs right now that she can choose from. Cherries, apples, stars and cows. She is still in the stage where she wears a pull up at night so we will don the pullup and then whatever pajama choice of the night it is. Tonight it was a new pair of cherry pjs. Carters truly does make the best ones. I think I even wore Carters when I was a kid. As an aside, we have some Carters that were hand me downs from a friend of ours whose daughter was born in 1999. Apparently the tag line for Carters then was "If they could just stay little until their Carters wore out"... I love it. So sweet.

Anyway, after pajamas are on, we head back to the bathroom to brush our teeth and depending on how much time we have based on whether dinner was on time or no tantrums were thrown, we will either head back into the living room to play for a bit or we start into the going to bed routine. Typically we split up the duties between us and we each take a child to put to bed.

For Nicole, it is reading a few books and then go and turn off her light together. Now with the warm weather, she has a fan running for both comfort and background noise. And then comes the best part. Since she is typically very tired by this point, she snuggles into my neck or rests her head on my shoulder and she does this very cute thing where she will put her hands behind her back so that she can try to hold my thumbs. Then she snuggles in and starts to get into that sleepy state. When she is almost there, I stand up, she picks up her head and puckers up for her kiss and then turns to reach for her crib. Now it doesn't always go this smoothly. Sometimes a few trips back into her room are necessary to calm her down for whatever reason du jour comes up. If we are lucky we will not hear from her again until 6AM. Though lately 5:30AM is her preference. In some ways I envy those moms whose children sleep until 8AM and in other ways I am glad to get a jump start on my day. Tonight looking at her in her crib, I realized my little baby isn't so little anymore. She almost takes up the entire length of the crib and I know she is only a little bit of a thing.

For Aimee, we read two books. Just two. We used to read a slew of them but then bedtime just got dragged out further and further. So we tell her during teeth brushing that she will need to pick out 2 books. After the books are read, she climbs into bed and we arrange all of her most important things around her. We have the fisher price puppy, countless babies, teddy bears, a lovey that she just formed an attachment to and her white blanket. She really didn't ever have one thing that she needed in bed at night which I think is because she still sucks her fingers and then suddenly she had this obsession with a white blanket. She snuggles in with all of these things and tries to fall asleep. This is where my dread for the evening activities begins. If she has had a nap, it may take over an hour to get her to fully relax enough to fall asleep. If she has not had a nap it takes about 10 minutes and she is out cold. But again, no nap equals temper tantrums and overall meltdowns by the 6 o'clock hour and sometimes results in her being overtired and crying out for me in the middle of the night. There are other times we start this process at 7PM and by 9PM we are still telling her to go to sleep. We are at a point where at least she will stay in her bed except for the occasional potty trip but at least she will stay in her room. Sometimes this exercise lasts so long that I go to bed before she is fully asleep.

I will admit that I don't hate the middle of the night wakeups. Yes, it interrupts the sleep but with Aimee I go into her room and lay down with her and we have the sweetest conversations about what is coming up for tomorrow and what we did today. I then tell her I love her and get an I love you in response and we cuddle in for a little bit. Inevitably I wake up and limp my way back to my bed. You see Aimee has a twin bed and apparently I can contort myself into a pretzel like position to cuddle in with her. I wouldn't mind her snuggling with me on most nights but she really can kick like a professional soccer player. Yow!

In all of this it reminds me how much bedtime has changed since we became parents. When we first had Aimee, bedtime was irrelevant. It was based on her last eating. I remember I would nurse her at about 8PM and then go to bed and she would stay up with Gary resting her head on his chest and sleep until about midnight when he would give her a bottle and then they would come into the bedroom and go to sleep and I would get up for the 4AM feeding. I think at about 6 weeks she got into a groove where she slept 6 hours in a row. I remember it distinctly because we went away to the Cape for a weekend wedding and it was the weekend after Labor Day. Nicole on the other hand being the second child, I just pulled her into bed with me when she needed to eat and I think I actually got muchmore sleep the second time around. But, I hate that my memory leaves me so that I can't quite remember how we got to where we are now for goodnights. I do know that it took a while and there are still nights where we get middle of the night wake ups from one or both of the girls.

I do not for one second ever regret becoming a parent. I just wished someone had told me how much I would miss sleep. I mean I knew the obvious would happen with a newborn that they can only sleep so long because of their little stomachs. But no one told me that it would last for almost 3 years. A friend did tell me that it's always something. You get over one cold, one tooth, one issue, one something and another thing comes up. Such is life.

May you all have sweet dreams and Goodnights.