Over the summer, as Mary Jane’s birth approached, we helped the boys (6 and nearly 3) make the transition to sleeping together in another bedroom. Because one of the purposes was to wean Milo from his late-evening and early-morning nursing sessions, Mark took over the bedtime routine for both boys. While I lie down to nurse the baby in our bedroom, Mark supervises toothbrushing, lies down with Oscar and Milo, reads them stories, turns off the light, helps them say their prayers, and waits with them in the dark while the boys drift off to sleep.
This works pretty well, except that Mark often falls asleep before the boys do. Sometimes he makes it back to our bedroom around 2 a.m.; other times, his alarm goes off and I have to crawl across the beds to shut it off myself.
Another drawback: now that the routine is well established, what do I do when Mark is out of town for the night, as he was last night? Bedtime has always been the hardest part of Mark’s business trips. When the whole family was sharing a bed, I couldn’t stand sleeping between the children (the dreaded "mommy sandwich"), and either child wept pitifully if made to sleep "on the outside." Even when Oscar was our only little one, the absence of his dad disturbed him into a frenetic state; my strategy then was to close the bedroom door and do crossword puzzles while Oscar ran about and played on the floor, until he collapsed around one-thirty in the morning.
And here was the first three-child overnight without Daddy, the first one with a second bedroom. I discussed it with Hannah and came up with a plan.
The first part, of course, is to stay out of bed until both boys are actually, you know, tired. That wasn’t too hard, because Tuesday is Family Gym Night in our house. Oscar has an evening swimming lesson at the Y. Milo horsed around with other children in the (ahem) "Kids Gym" (aka hourly child care). So they both had an active evening, plus I intentionally avoided putting Milo down for an afternoon nap. We ordered pizza for a late supper when we got home, and it arrived around 8:45. Then I sent them downstairs to play for a while. We tidied the living room together and climbed the stairs at, I think, 10:47.
I had left Paddle-to-the-Sea lying around earlier — it’s one of the extra "school" books I planned to read to the children this year. Oscar was thumbing through it while I swept the living room, and the lively illustrations interested him. He asked for it for his bedtime story. A perfect choice.
As the children jumped bouncing onto their bed, I dragged a chair and a footstool into the bedroom and placed them with the back toward the door. I overturned a laundry basket for a table, and set on it Paddle-to-the-Sea, Little House in the Big Woods, and a quart jar full of ice water. I turned off the bedroom light and turned on the hall light so it streamed into the bedroom and silhouetted the chair. "Here are the rules," I said. "I am going to sit in this chair and read you stories until you fall asleep. If you sit up, I will stop reading until you lie down. If you talk to me or ask me questions, I will stop reading until you are quiet. If you don’t like this story, let me know and I will switch to the Laura and Mary book. Are you ready?"
"Yes," they said.
So I settled myself into the chair, nursing MJ in the sling, and began to tell the adventure of the little carved Indian in his canoe making his way from the hillside above the Nipigon River to Lake Superior. Milo asked two questions and each time Oscar urged him, "Ssshhh!" I looked up from time to time to see two pairs of eyes reflecting the hall light back at me. Then came a time when there was only one pair of eyes; Milo had rolled himself into a ball under the covers. I kept reading.
At one point I looked up at Oscar and said, matter-of-factly, "Why don’t you close your eyes and try to go to sleep? You won’t miss anything; you can tell me where to start the book again tomorrow." He turned over immediately and closed his eyes.
The little carved Indian made it to Duluth, and then to the Apostle Islands, and when I reached the end of a chapter I paused, listening to soft steady breathing and to MJ’s suckling grunts. Carefully I got up, cleared the doorway in case someone came looking for me in the night, and returned to the bedroom. It was 11:30.
I’d gotten them to sleep, and it was — the time that I normally turn out my own light.
I wonder if this technique would work for Mark?
UPDATE: Just to clarify, I didn’t mean, would it work on Mark.
bearing blog 