There is a time of each day that I absolutely dread.
Not the 6 a.m. wake-up calls from our nearly two-year-old daughter. Not the five minutes I’m scrambling before a lunch meeting to gather my notes. Not even the hectic time of preparing dinner for two rowdy and hungry children.
No the time I dread in each day is bedtime! What is it about children and not wanting to go to bed? When I’ve had a full day (and trust me those are plentiful right now) I’m ready to collapse into my cool sheets, snuggle up with my pillow and check out from the world.
Our three-year-old, however, is happy as a lark to stay up later and later each night. Bedtime used to be wrapped up by 8:30. Now we find ourselves still fighting with her to get into bed at 9:30. How did this happen I ask myself? And I don’t have an answer. Except I was tired of the nightly argument of “but Mommy it’s still light outside.” So this summer, bedtime has been extended. Ideally, though, they would be in their beds and asleep by 9 p.m. – thereby giving my husband and me a couple precious hours of alone time a night. But no such luck.
When my children stayed with my parents last week for four nights, my mother tells me in a I-don’t-know-what-you’re-doing-wrong voice, “I have no trouble getting them to bed. There’s no crying.”
So is it manipulation on Belle’s part? She knows that if she continues to fight with Mommy and Daddy that she won’t have to go to sleep?
And before you ask… yes, we have a bedtime routine. Have always had a bedtime routine. We do bath time. I allow them to play in the tub. We dry our hair, brush our teeth and then put on their pjs. And then we have storytime – with no fewer than three stories read nightly. But even then, she starts asking for one more book. We put her younger sister to bed, sing her a song, say her prayers and then return to her room. And that’s when the tantrums begin.
We try to rationalize with her (which is an oxymoron unto itself.) We try to console her. Bribe her. “I’ll give you two coins in the morning is you stay in bed and go to sleep.” We resort to spanking and then threatening her with taking away her most valued possession: her toy Tiger from Kung Fu Panda. And sometimes that works and sometimes the tantrums escalate.
I’ve read many, many books about raising children – including the Supernanny book, How to Get the Best from Your Children. And frankly, I’m doing everything she suggests in her book. I’m out of ideas and nearly desperate enough to call on the Supernanny herself to visit the heart of the Mountain State to see if she can tame this unruly three-year-old.
I welcome your suggestions and/or sympathies.
Rachelle Beckner is a thirty-something mother of two beautiful, rambunctious girls, ages 3 and 21 months. She lives, works and plays in Charleston, WV, the capital city of the Mountain State, with her husband of four years. Rachelle enjoys social networking through Twitter and Facebook, dabbling in online and viral marketing, and volunteering in a grass-roots organization called Generation Charleston, which has the goal of improving life in the Capitol City for the next generation. Her online presence also extends to two blogs — the most recent of which is Mountain State Motherhood.
As a young girl, poor and living in the English countryside, Jane enjoyed the outdoors. One evening, she brought four earthworms with her to bed. Did her mother go scream and shout, “What are you doing? Look at the mess you’ve made,” when she discovered Slimey and his friends had come inside for a sleepover? No! She didn’t angrily strip the bed, throw the sheets in the wash and threaten to bath Jane again. No, Jane’s mother simply explained to her curious daughter that if she kept the earthworms with her in bed they would die because they needed the soil to live. So Jane went back outside to deposit her friends back into the garden.
