Night-night...

Posted By SLK on Tuesday, August 31, 2010   { 4 Comment(s) }

Each night, Kit and I spend at least 5 minutes negotiating number of books for bedtime reading. She has become very clever – she starts with 10 and settles for somewhere around 7-8 on most days. Some days, when I am adamant or just not in the mood, she will become mini Me and say “7 or 20?” which is a direct lift off from my “3 or zero?” threat that I use on her occasionally when things get out of hand.

When we finally do agree on the number of books, we spend the next half hour or so snuggled up in bed reading them – and this is the time when Kit is allowed to suck her thumb and she uses her freedom to the full. Along with this comes the newly acquired habit of feeling my ear with the other finger and the even more recent habit of alternating hands so you can imagine how wet and sticky my ears are at the end of all this. Thumb on hand 1 goes in the mouth, hand 2 feels my ear - after a few seconds hand 1 with wet thumb feels my ear and dry hand 2 thumb goes in mouth and so on...

(We are reading a book from the library called ‘Is your mama a Llama?’ nowadays. I love this book myself and we read this almost every day. There is a kangaroo called Rhonda in this and Kit loves the sound of this name and wants us to call her that from now on and for the last few days she was actually upset when every night she would remember that we forgot to call her Rhonda during the day! )

Anyhow, once the books are read and the lights are out, Kit is happy for me to leave the room as long as she can feel my ears one last time, pee again and drink water (in that order)! One last hug and kiss and I’m out – monitor on and Kit is generally good for the next 10 hours.



THEN I enter Kat’s room and find her sitting quietly with a book in her favourite chair (both girls have identical chairs). Although there is no negotiating books, there is ALWAYS negotiating bedtime. Whatever bedtime we agree on, Kat always wants 5 minutes more! Then comes the ‘forever brush (both tooth and hair) time’ – I could cook an entire dinner for a family of 10 in that time it seems...Kat can never go to sleep without watering her plants (some new app on her iPhone using which she continues to send virtual bouquets to her friends/family) so an additional 5 minutes are spent watering (!) some virtual plants while I look over them, thinking they do look cute (no wonder Kit wanted to do the same when Kit Kat had an argument this morning!) FINALLY, Kat is ready for bed – takes off her glasses – prepares a mount of books at her bedside for morning time read (a summer break luxury only for a few more days) and snuggles into bed in the right position (with the hair intact etc). Lights out in this room now…I stagger out picking up dropped clothes on the way and make it to my room now where Papa by this time is deep into Financial Times.

Once in my room, I pick up some more dropped clothes (now I know where Kat gets her these genes from!) and hop on the bed (literally – this one is exceptionally high for no reason) and hear the familiar clicking in my knee (Oh God, am I now getting old after having just 2 kids?) and after some one-sided conversation with Papa or (if I’m lucky) some monosyllables back, I go to bed with my e-reader which then takes ages to load because most days I am too busy to remember to charge it/sync it and now its too much hard work to bother – so I just cuddle up and finally go to bed. Night-night...

Tags: child play, sleep habits