Bedtime

We seem to go back and forth lately with D on bedtimes. Generally, he does fine - goes to bed without a lot of drama, sleeps all night, etc. But once in a while we start to go through an "I'm going to make bedtime really hard" phase. Apparently we're entering another one of those.

He's the king of stall tactics - wanting to get up and go potty even though he just went 5 minutes ago, one more book, one more hug, one more kiss, fix my covers, I need a drink.... On and on and on. And he is a child who epitomizes the whole "give them an inch and they take a mile" thing. If you start giving in on anything, he pushes HARD to see how much more he can get. There was a time when his naptime routine (back when he napped) had grown to include so many steps it would take 45 minutes just to get through all of it. It's like, if you do something he requests, even if it seems like a one time, no big deal thing, eventually it becomes a big deal.

Part of the problem lately is totally our fault. We haven't been great about getting him to bed on time. Realistically, he needs to be in bed by 7; we've been pushing it to 7:30 or later way too often. Once in a while is fine, but he's always been very sensitive to keeping his sleep schedule. Although he's become more flexible as he's gotten older, the fact still remains that when we don't do a good job getting him into bed on time, bedtime starts to get ugly.

Tonight... well, tonight isn't going so great. My husband is doing a good job handling it, but it is so frustrating. I keep telling myself he's going to bed early tonight, and like tonight, something comes up and it doesn't happen. He seriously needs like a week of early bedtimes to catch up so he'll quit acting like a monster when we try to put him to bed.

And I swear, if either of them wake up before 6am again tomorrow, I'm going to scream. But that's another story.