Bedtime!

I know that many parents believe that to put a child to bed one needs to just lay said child down and be firm that he not get out of bed. That works great in theory. It also works great before the child can climb out of his or her crib. It does not, however, work when the child moves up to a "big boy bed"--at least not in my world.

Joseph and Jacob used to be put in their cribs at bed time after a little bit of cuddling. They were always still mostly awake and once laid down would usually go to sleep on their own. However, once they started climbing out of their crib it was always a battle at bedtime. The battle only got worse once they moved to their twin sized beds. At some point Jereme and I decided that we would just cuddle the boys until they fell asleep. So, we lay them down and sing to them until they go to sleep. Obviously, we have parameters that we keep. If one of the boys is fighting sleep they will get in trouble after a certain amount of time has passed...but why make EVERY night a battle? Before we cuddled them until they were asleep, bedtime turned into a two hour battle every night. Everyone was stressed and traumatized, and who sleeps well after something like that? So, bedtime became our special cuddle time, and it's worked for us.

Our schedule has been a little messed up this last week or so because I had a hysterectomy a week ago Thursday. Instead of me cuddling the boys in their beds each night, whichever boy it was my night to cuddle came to my bed until Jereme had the other one asleep. Tonight I felt well enough to actually go back to the old routine, and it was my night to cuddle Joseph. I came upstairs and the boys started getting ready for bed, and I needed to go back downstairs for something. When I came back upstairs again, Joseph was in his bed, and he didn't want to cuddle. After a few minutes I checked on him (in the past he's said he didn't want to cuddle and he was always up and playing after a few minutes) and he was sound asleep! The time has come when Joseph is growing into such a big boy, and I'm going to miss our cuddle time at bedtime so much!