Goodnight Nobody. Goodnight Mush. The Bedtime Routine.
By Jim Zola
Jim.zola@ci.high-point.nc.us

This isn't any secret I am revealing here. I assume everyone with at least one child eventually comes to terms with the bedtime routine. But from personal experience I can tell you that one's perspective on life can go from dark to light once they discover and perfect that routine.

Having two young children (two and three years old now) who share a bedroom has made the fine-tuning of the bedtime routine all the more important. When one child wakes in the middle of the night due to sickness or nightmare, there is a mad dash at our house to reach the crying child before the cries wake the second sleeping child. Our bed is crowded enough with three bodies, but four equals a sleepless night for at least one of us. It took us about 18 months to reach the bedtime nirvana. This simply means that both of the kids are in bed and relatively quiet before Mom and Dad collapse in fatigue. A good solid bedtime routine might not prevent occasional trips to planet goofy, but at least it helps prevent parents from taking up full-time residence there.

So wha'ts our secret? We start with the bath time. In order to get both our little ones into the bathroom to start the bath procedure, we have a bath time song and a bath time march. (You can lead a horse to water, but you can‚t make him take a bath?) This tends to discourage defection. I usually give the two of them lots of playtime in the tub. They have a net bag of toys and can entertain themselves for a long time. I take this time and catch up on reading the newspaper, looking through the stack of professional journals I am suppose to read each month, or just pleasure read. I sit in the bathroom and referee any squabbles. I imagine that if I were to write and publish a book of poems, an appropriate title would be "The Bath Time Sonnets".

After the bath, the dramatics of the hair washing, and the resistance to leaving the tub, we brush the teeth and make faces in the mirror, then head out to get pj's on. With our kids, the allure of bedtime stories is enough to prevent the naked chase around the house trying to diaper and dress the post-bath slick babies. They love storytime. We have certain favorites that I must have read at least two or three hundred times by now. It doesn‚t matter. Having two children at different age levels could make storytime more difficult. But the older one still enjoys the simple books, and then one of us (mom or dad) will take the older child and read the more complex stories (if Dr. Seuss can be deemed complex). One of our secrets to prevent bedtime story problems is to let the child at least pick out one story himself. We keep a shelf of books at child height so they can look through and chose. Then, as we are reading, we make sure that the child knows how many more stories we are reading and how many are left. Kind of like the two-minute warning in football. "The last story and then bedtime".

Here are some of our favorites it is interesting to note that most of these storybooks have been around forever. Bedtime stories do not necessarily need modernizing.

Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson

The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper

Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? By Bill Martin Jr. and Eric Carle

Jamberry by Bruce Degan

A Child's Good Night Book by Margaret Wise Brown

Good Night, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann 

In The Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendack

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd

What is it about these books? Simple structure, lots of repetition, lots of rhyme and gentle rhythms. Most of the books read like poetry, even if they are not poetry. They don‚t even need to make sense.

And I am sure many of you know what I am referring to when I say there is strong magic in these books. They put me to sleep. I can drink 3 cups of coffee and feel very awake, but after this point in the bedtime routine, I am often as lively as a sack of potatoes. I can‚t count the times I have drifted off in the middle of a story. The child in the my lap usually has the patience of a saint (or just a huge respect for the storytelling wisdom of this papa) and will sometimes let me go for about 5 minutes with a pause in the middle of a sentence and drool forming at the edge of my mouth. A gentle nudge and I will focus back in on the real world with a child looking into my face slightly puzzled. These stories just knock me out. I stumble through simple lines that I have read hundreds of times. The 3-year-old could recite the lines, but I struggle. To keep myself awake, sometimes I will demand interaction with the child, asking them to point out objects "where's the bowl full of mush in this picture?" Or I will change the characters name to my own child's name. My 3-year-old daughter loves these changes.

With the stories complete, i'ts a time for potty check and into bed. At this point, it is a good idea to let the child kind of determine his/her own routine for saying goodnight. My daughter went through months of asking the same questions at bedtime. "When's my birthday? What are my friends doing now?" The answers were the same every night, but somehow this sameness gave her reassurance. My son went through about 6 months of saying goodnight to his belly as he put on his pajamas. Someday, he will laugh about it or deny it.

We have always put our youngest children to sleep with music. When there was just one, we used a CD called "Daddy's Sing Lullabies‚. After a year of multiple plays every day, the CD wore out. Finally, after I checked on her one night and discovered that the same line of one song was repeating over and over endlessly, we decided some new music was needed. Imagine the potential psychological damage this unconscious abuse could cause. With a newborn in the room, we switch to some lullabies that had a heartbeat sound beneath the music. The songs were slow and insipid, but they seemed to work. Finally, we decided another change was needed, and now we are using a CD of classical hammered dulcimer music.

Music playing, goodnights said, kisses and hugs all around. Now, the door is shut and mom and dad look at each other and sigh. Another day gone. Goodnight to the old lady whispering "hush".