Stories

Story title: Bed time

 

This is a story about my daughter was she was about 3 or 4. I was about 32….

 

Every night the same series of events seemed to play out. We would finish dinner and clean up the table a bit and then I would begin the usual  hints about getting ready for the many steps on the way to bed. Usually that begin with… “Let’s pick up our toys and other things that we’ve been playing with and put them in a place so that we can find them.”.

 

I became an expert at rephrasing that in many different ways. Sometimes I just changed the accent on the way I was saying the words “Let’s clean up.” Sometimes I just started cleaning up, hoping that she would get interested in doing something with me. And sometimes I tried to make a game of the process… like one of those television shows where everybody starts singing and cleans up.

 

Invariably it would be a slow move and a stubborn one in that direction. She would get distracted by something she was putting away or she might wander off into a different room. She was certainly old enough to understand all of the pieces of going to bed. Then maybe once I finished picking everything up I would move on to the next step. “Let’s head for the tub and wash up,” I said.

 

She loves baths so getting to the tub was not too bad depending on where in the house she had ended up while I was cleaning up her toys. Getting her into the tub with a couple of toys wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was getting her out of the tub. I think after about twenty minutes of explaining that it was time to move on to the next step, the water would have gone cold and I couldn’t see how she would even want to stay in there anyway.

 

So again there was a lot of cajoling and language that seemed just short of begging. Eventually we would finally get out of the tub, get a towel on and start to dry off. The next step was getting on pajamas. It doesn’t sound like a big project but somehow every night it seem to take a long time to just put on those  pajamas. 

Then came brushing teeth. By then she’d disappeared and headed down some hallway. I’d go track her down with a toothbrush and toothpaste in hand. I might try to play with her by saying, “I’ll do my teeth while you do your teeth. Let’s do it together.” I was always trying some persuasive strategy. I’m sure I tried one thousand different creative ways to convince her that it was time for us to  brush our teeth.

 

Then of course we arrived at story time. You might ask yourself how long should it take for your child to pick out a book. Once the books were were stacked by the bed it took another ten minutes to agree on the book order, the cup of water by the bed, the stuffed animals up for emotional support and where was the dog going lie down. Once that was sorted out we were ready to read. 

Reading was pretty easy when she was really little because she couldn’t keep track of what page I was on. But once she was older she knew if I was flipping forward too fast or skipping any of the words… or pages. Worst of all I would start to nod off and that usually resulted in an elbow to the ribs.

 

 

Well one day I decided to pull the old “Let’s reverse our roles,” game. As a teacher I have used this many times. For example, I have had students make the test and then they have me answer the questions. So, right after dinner I proposed that it would be a cool game if we switched places. She loved the idea of being the parent and being the responsible one. Soon she was giving me order after order after order. And just as she would have, I was very easily distracted or uninterested and remarkably unwilling to move to the next task in a timely fashion. You can imagine what it looked like. I played it all the way out. Two hours later she was thoroughly exhausted by her valiant effort to properly put me to bed. She confided the next morning that putting a child to bed can be very tiring.

 

Now I’m not going to say that it made for a perfect turn around. But it was worth a good story and I think it made a difference. At least it broke up “the same thing happens every night.”