We’re on vacation this week in the Outer Banks, 300 miles away from home and even further away from our normal routines, the chief aberration being bedtime.
We have been building up to a mild boondoggle with our 3 ½-year-old daughter for a while now in that she’s holding our evenings hostage with an epic procedure that begins with a and teeth brushing at around 7:30 p.m., followed by a book in the rocking chair and doesn’t wind down until around 9:30 p.m. after yet another trip to the potty and a session of in bed with her. This ritual is, in a word, exhausting. It means that I don’t get around to making lunches and packing up all that is needed to go to school and work for the next day until nearly 10 p.m.
It’s great that my girl loves to cuddle with me at the end of a long day of less cozy pursuits. But the night just goes on way too long for a little girl who needs her sleep and for her mother who needs to sit down on the couch with a book or magazine for a few minutes every night in order to feel like her old self, the woman who had a little before having children.
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Here at the , we’re willing to let go of some of the work-week rigidity in the routine. Everything has to happen on a sliding scale here this week – we’re here with family who live in several states and who we don’t get to see very often, so I want to make sure that we all get to spend time together having fun. But is something that we are doing our reasonable best to keep on track, even nipping the lengthy cuddle sessions in the bud, blaming the change on the fact that my daughter and her 15-month-old brother are sharing a room this week and we can’t keep the baby awake forever. And I admit that my motivations are a tad selfish, too, because their bedtime is when my starts.
