When I have spoken recently of organizing my life, I have really been referring more to rhythm and routine, rather than cleaning out drawers and that sort of thing. In a homeschooling family in which dad works from home it can be very easy (in the absence of a type a adult) to allow structure and routine to fall to the wayside.
My first order of business was to restore bedtime and rest time routines, and establish earlier bedtimes. The summer months lend themselves to late days in the garden, even later dinners, and ridiculously late bedtimes for us. With the coming of Fall and the beginning of a new school year, schedules typically shift back into an earlier routine, but we just hadn’t managed to do so yet.
Each of my children has been completely unique in the sleep department. Seth was a poor sleeper and I am not sure that we ever found his rhythm. He required elaborate dance routines on the part of his exhausted college student parents to fall asleep. He coslept with us off and on until he was ummmm maybe six??
Then Keats came along and could be layed down on his own awake and he would fall asleep. Larkspur was similar, both of them sleeping through the night around six weeks of age despite being exclusively breastfed babies, both of them taking lovely long naps each afternoon with little fuss. And they didn’t cosleep either beyond six weeks. It just wasn’t right for them.
Then Beatrix came along and everything changed again. I would define her as a poor sleeper alongside Seth, although that’s probably not the case. She simply had her own unique needs that required lots of contact with me. She was a long term nighttime nurser and we failed to discover the bedtime routine she needed until…last week. In a busy large family it can be easy to neglect regular naptimes and such for the youngest child. For months Bea has taken her nap each day after falling asleep riding around on Jonny’s back each afternoon. We never meant to fall into such a routine, it just happened. We reached a point where the only way for her to fall asleep was to ride around on someone’s back and she was not going to bed at night until after ten p.m. or later because she wouldn’t end up on Jonny’s back until after bedtime stories and everyone else being put to bed, and then it would take her an hour or so to fall asleep. Our baby (or do I have to say toddler-she’ll be two next week!!) was sleeping less than our older children. If we tried to put her to bed earlier she would wake after an hour and then be up for hours. BUT I knew she wasn’t getting enough sleep.
So I made a decision. No more backpack rides with sleep as the goal. Beatrix needed a regular routine everyday, and I would make that a priority. Bedtime would be backed up a full three hours (the time change helped that!) and naptime would be shifted back a full three and a half hours.
So here’s the routine, although there’s certainly nothing unique about it:
Beatrix wakes each day at 7 a.m. (before the time change she woke at 8 and sometimes 9 a.m.)
breakfast, homeschooling, etc. happens for a few hours.
Let me back up and say that I am not a schedule my life sort of person. I wouldn’t mind if someone else scheduled it for me and enforced things, I’d like it. But if it has to come from me, I have a really hard time with it. Just doesn’t come naturally to me. And Jonny? He’s a disaster in that department. We purchased a big desk calendar and hung it on the wall a couple of days ago and we are convinced it’s the key to many of the major life changes we need. But I digress…
With bedtimes, what I have discovered is that if I don’t set a time and really stick with it, they get progressively later, we miss the “window” and our children become really hard to get to sleep.
So, for naptime:
Now I stop whatever I am doing at about 11:15 a.m. and prepare Beatrix for “rest time with mommy.” All other children are instructed to work quietly or go outside because our house is so small and sound carries. Unfortunately Trudy hasn’t figured out yet that we really don’t appreciate when she barks at a leaf rustling on the porch or some other scary thing during naptime.
By 11:30 Bea and I are tucked in my bed with a couple of books. I read the (short) books, we say prayers, and then Beatrix snuggles close and hopefully falls asleep. The first day we tried this, it was closer to 12:30 when we started and after two hours, she wasn’t asleep and I was really really grouchy. I cannot spend several hours laying in bed with Bea everyday. So I backed things up to 11:30 thinking I may have missed Bea’s naptime window, and set my limit for laying with her at 45 minutes, and that includes the time spent reading and praying. I removed the expectation that she would fall sleep because that set me up for frustration, and focused instead on the importance of this new rhythm and giving her the opportunity to relax and possibly sleep. Some days she falls asleep (at which point I carefully exit the bed) and some days she doesn’t. When she does, her nap only lasts about half an hour. I have to trust that is all she needs, and give up my dreams of her sleeping for hours while math and language lessons are accomplished! I am just pleased with this bit of routine. I know it must be good for Bea.
The nighttime bedtime routine is similar, but has involved family wide changes. Dinner is no longer at 7:30 because I want my girls sleeping by then! I have to discipline myself into starting dinner around 3:30 or 4, when I am at my most tired, so that we can eat by 5 or 5:30. I know, can’t I find some quicker meals to make?? Anyway, after dinner it’s baths for the girls and showers for the boys so that we are ready to sit down and read bedtime stories to the girls (the boys listen too) by 6:30. By 7, I want to be upstairs in bed with the girls saying prayers. After prayers, Larkspur moves into her bed on the floor next to ours, and Beatrix snuggles, and I mean snuggles!, close to me and falls asleep within minutes, as does Larkspur. I tell you this 7 o’clock bedtime that I have been hearing about for years really seems to work!
Later, when Jonny and I go to bed, we move Beatrix to her own little bed where she usually stays until somewhere between 5 and 7 a.m.
Once the girls are asleep, I head downstairs to read a chapter or two of whatever we are currently reading to the boys. Keats and Gabe head to bed by 8:30 and Seth is in bed around 9. Seth had been staying up so incredibly late and then couldn’t fall asleep. Getting him into bed earlier is really important.
So now you know that we have been really terrible for a long time in the bedtime department, but that we are trying to do better now! So far things are going so well and I am really pleased, especially just knowing that my kids are getting more sleep. It is also really nice for Jonny and I to have a couple more hours to ourselves in the evening, and this allows us to go to bed a bit earlier now too.
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