Score 1 For The Parents!

Last night on the way home from picking the kids up, I looked in the backseat and saw my daughter looking kind of sad. I asked her what was wrong, and she said “mommy, I’m tired”. It was 5:30, so I told her she needed to stay up a couple more hours and then she could go to sleep.

Now let me back up here…..we are not schedule people. And our daughter has never needed a whole lot of sleep. So she usually doesn’t go to bed until we go to bed around 10:00 or 11:00. I’m hearing a lot of gasps and murmuring of what a bad mother I am….but hear me out. Since she goes to a private sitter, we don’t have to wake her up in the morning. We just pick her up and put her in her car seat….she usually doesn’t wake up at all. Then she continues to sleep at the sitter’s until she’s ready to get up. So she’s getting a good amount of sleep. We also started doing this because if we didn’t, and she went to bed at 8:00 every night, we would get two hours with her each day. Not enough for me! This way, we eat, we play, we read stories, and we hang out together. Now my son is a different story. He has to be in bed by 9:00 at the latest or he is just miserable. So with him going to bed earlier, we get some good quality time with our daughter, which is good because so much of the night my son is attached to my hip and I know she feels very jealous.

So back to last night….we eat dinner and go outside and play, and around 8:00 we tell her she needs to come in and take a bath (we were actually the first parents to call their kids in….that NEVER happens!). So she put her toys away, and went up and took a bath. I put my son to sleep, and then my daughter and I played for ½ hour….we had a tea party (all of the princesses were there!) and then we read a couple of stories. At 9:00 I told her it was time for bed….she protested a little, but then I remembered that my sister (who has to share a room with my daughter when she stays with us) said that my daughter really liked listening to books on CD with her. So I went downstairs and got her “Goldilocks and The Three Bears” CD, pushed “play” and left the room. I never heard from her again! So my husband and I actually got 1 ½ hours to watch anything WE wanted to watch on TV and hang out together. I can honestly say that it felt very strange to have the kids in bed so early! It was nice, but I don’t think it’s something I would want all the time – I missed my kids too much!