Parenting Tip #2

On the subject of bedtimes:

Alright come with me on on this. Imagine Captain Barbosa from the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. Think about his catch phrase concerning his philosophy on the pirate's code. Ok, got that in your head? Great. Now. Concerning bedtimes for toddlers? It's more a guideline.

I'm a big fan of consistency movement. I do believe that kids need structure and routine. However, being too rigid is just as bad as being too lax. So, on the subject of bedtimes, we aim for 8. We also aim to get him into his bed. We tend to be more successful on the former rather than the latter.

I'll be the first to admit that we need to get him into the bed. There are a host of reasons why he's not...at least over time. We've actually been on the receiving end of a lot of well meaning criticism concerning this point. Truly, he does need to move.

However.

I've been paying a lot of attention to the number of majorly disrupted nights for Thomas's cousin. They seem to be up with her 4-5 nights out of 7 on average. When one of them gets up, they are up with her a minimum of an hour and often more than 2. It's been like that for the last couple of years. They have good streaks and bad ones, but this seems generally true. We get an update every morning.

Having Thomas on the couch, we've had 0 disrupted nights out of 7 unless he's demonstrably ill. Once he's asleep, we can head off most wake ups before he really wakes up. It's not that he's a better kid, he's just right next to use. So instead of being up an hour getting him resettled, we are up less than 10 minutes changing a diaper or getting him water. So we net more sleep.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not saying he doesn't need to move. He absolutely does and we are working him in that direction. However, if it comes down to losing sleep the way my in laws do night after night or taking the time to do this shift slowly and gently to preserve what sleep we get during the school year. I'm going to preserve as much sleep as I can.

So in regards to betimes: it's all just guidelines and we are working on it. We'll get him there eventually.