Routines

I’m all for routines and it’s a well-known fact that children thrive on them. If I had my way I’d have the kids feed, bathed and in bed by 4.30pm.

I almost did the other day. It got to the bedtime bit and then I looked at the clock. This had the potential to backfire with them waking at 4am so I decided to let them ‘stay up’ and do a quiet activity.

Because it was darkening outside, I haven’t yet taught two of them to tell the time and it didn’t occur to the oldest to check the clock, this went down like I’d just announced they could have a bag of lollies for supper.

They were little angels and quietly went about their respective drawing, writing and car activities allowing me to watch the likes of the Ellen show and the news (while multi-tasking of course) undisturbed. By the time Shortland Street came on, they happily trotted off to bed, believing they’d had a pretty radical treat.

The next night, I again fed them early and Master Four, a stickler for routine, moseyed off to run the bath at 4.15pm announcing “I’m gonna have the first bath and then I can stay up and do an activity.”

What a treat!

This made for a no-fuss bed-time, considering, before this, the only way I could coax them to bed was promising a “great big boof”. This is when they get thrown into bed with a “boof”. It went from swinging them with a “one and a two and a three – boof” to the boof never being big enough so each night they had to be swung and dropped onto their pillows from a greater height. Not ideal on one’s back with growing kids.

But I’ll happily summon up the strength to give them a great big boof if I get a whole lot of down-time at the end of the day. In fact, there’s a good line-up on tv tonight so I might go peel the spuds now.