Bedtime Shift

For as long as I can remember, I have been a bedtime reader. I love a good story, sometimes to the detriment of a good night’s rest. So it’s no surprise that my kids read at bedtime, too. It’s a habit we started before they could identify the letters of the alphabet, when I would nestle two, then three, small children onto my lap and read as part of the bedtime routine.

 

Bedtime reading -- even long after you outgrow the cradle!

One night last week it struck me – out of the blue, as these parenting things so often do – how much that bedtime routine has changed at our house over the years.

I was tucking in the not-so-little-anymore littlest one when it hit me that she is the only one I still read to on a regular basis – and that soon she’ll probably want to read on her own at bedtime, as her older brother and sister do now.

When the kids were little, we would take turns snuggling all together in one bed or another, rotating whose turn it was to choose the book. There were favorites, of course, most memorably Goodnight Moon and The Going to Bed Book. I can still recite large portions of both from memory.

As the kids grew – in both stature and story savvy – we moved to the stairs, where I could snuggle one child onto my lap and the other two on either side. We shifted from rhyming picture books to longer stories, then progressed to chapter books. I read the Little House on the Prairie series, a couple of E.B. White classics, and the first two or three Harry Potter books out loud to my children at bedtimes.

Gradually, as the older two became stronger independent readers, one or both of them would be too enmeshed in whatever book they were reading on their own to join the family bedtime reading session. I’d often find myself sitting unnecessarily on the stairs with only one child.

Now the youngest McPhaul is an independent reader, too. We still read together most nights, she and I, although now we alternate pages: she reads a page to me, I read a page to her.

I tuck the other kids in before or after, sharing a few moments – often our only one-on-one time of the day – to hear the news from their day, or to answer kid questions, or to simply appreciate that they still want me to tuck them in.

Bedtime is, however, not always peaceful. A morning person by nature, I am often frazzled by then – distracted by the running list of things to do before I get to go to bed myself, thinking of some work challenge or household task, or frustrated by the disarray I find when I step into the kids’ rooms to say goodnight. 

Many nights I have to will myself to take a deep, calming breath and carry on through tucking-in time with some sense of calm. (I am not always successful in this endeavor.)

The littlest one takes the longest to tuck in. She often has reading homework, which she insists on saving until bedtime. After that, there is a whole series of bedtime measures that must be taken: a special song, our secret handshake, and a specific sequence of kisses. This can be both sweet and exhausting.

Since my bedtime revelation last week, I am embracing the sweet side of the bedtime routine and trying to let go of the rest.

This youngest child and her older sister often tiptoe downstairs – or slide down the banister – to find me long after they’ve been tucked in. They need a drink of water or to pack something in a school bag or to tell me one more thing. Sometimes they’re just after an extra hug.

Some nights I hurry them back to bed with a quick squeeze and a firm admonition to go to sleep. But sometimes I linger in that last hug of the night. I notice how tall my children have become and wonder how much longer they’ll come to me for one more post-bedtime cuddle. I know this phase, too, will pass as they grow bigger, more independent, further from those nights of bedtime stories read together.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the March 24, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record. 

Power perspective

A blustery autumn wind blew the power out Monday night, and with it went the lights, my Internet connection, and such other modern luxuries as flushing the toilet and running the dishwasher. The electricity was out for only a few hours, enough time to be a minor annoyance, but not long enough to miss taking a shower or to lose the summer’s bounty of berries stored in the freezer.

We lose power a handful of times throughout the year, most often in winter, but thankfully not usually for very long – anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days. With the nuisance factor of a power outage comes the opportunity, by necessity, to alter how we do things. These brief power outages offer a change of pace, a chance to rediscover the allure of reading by the soft glow of candlelight in a normally lit-up world, and a renewed appreciation of some of the flip-of-a-switch conveniences we take for granted.

Because our kitchen has a gas stove, cooking without electricity requires only some minor adjustments – a book of matches and a camping lantern by which to see. We keep a two-gallon jug of water in the pantry for such occasions and a slew of flashlights scattered throughout the house. Because I’m a caffeine junkie, I have two back-up, no-electricity-required systems for brewing my morning coffee. Only recently have I obtained a smart phone, which allowed me during this latest outage to check email, keep in touch with my working-late husband, and call PSNH to see when the power might be back on.

Losing power no longer means being isolated from the news of the world or the happenings down the road. All in all, it’s not so terrible, really; like most things, it’s all in your perspective. I try to take a cue from my children, who consider the mandatory darkness an adventure. The kids enjoy eating at a table lit by candles. They take glow sticks to bed in the absence of their normal nightlights. Reading bedtime stories by lantern light makes them feel like they’re inside the pages of Little House on the Prairie, even if our lantern is powered by batteries and lit with LED bulbs instead of kerosene and a wick.

The spring our twins were infants a Nor’easter knocked trees and power lines down, and we were without electricity for three nights and four days. It was mid-April, but still winter-cold. We blocked off the two entries to our large living room with old blankets, lit a fire in the fireplace, drained the pipes, and hunkered down through the storm.

The babies were only three months old then, so sleep was already a scarcity for my husband and me, which made waking to feed the fire every hour or so through those cold, dark nights just one more middle-of-the-night chore. While my husband absconded each morning to his office, where there was electricity and a hot shower, I remained at home in the living room. When I look back on those few days, I don’t recall how much of a hassle it must have been to change diapers and feed myself and my children in a chilly house without electric lights or running water.

What I do remember is that, unable to vacuum or do laundry or the dishes, without the distraction of the Internet (no iPhone back then), and before I had returned to paid employment, I read my way through a few books and a couple of magazines. I soaked up the quiet and the warmth from the fireplace and snuggled into a nest of blankets with my new children, the dog, and the two cats.

I also remember the morning after the power came back. The winds that had shaken our house a few nights earlier and knocked the power out were gone, along with the mechanic hum of the neighbor’s generator. I bundled the babies into the stroller, grabbed the dog’s leash, and we headed out into the welcome spring sunshine. Birdsong mixed that bright, calm morning with the buzz of chainsaws as crews continued to clear downed trees from roads and utility lines.

That day I did lots of laundry, ran the dishwasher, bathed the children. I was relieved by the return to electricity and running water. I had a new appreciation of central heat. And as night fell, I was thankful for such a little thing as flipping a switch and being flooded in light.

Original content posted by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul on her Blog:Writings From A Full Life. This essay also appears as her Close to Home column in the October 11, 2013 edition of the Littleton Record.

Summer reading

People have been reinventing the way we tell – and hear – stories since there have been human stories to share. The petroglyphs on the cave wall gave way to stone tablets, which evolved to ink and paper. Stories told around the fire turned to families gathered around the radio, then the big screen of the movie theater, and eventually the television in every living room. Now we can stream movies through our laptop computers and read books on our smart phones.

No matter the medium for telling them, there are some stories that become favorites. It is these we turn to again and again, whether cherished family tales or literary classics.

I have told my children stories and read them books since their earliest days. When the older two were babies, I would plop them into their reclined, bouncing baby seats and position myself between the two, a pile of books within reach. Looking at the bright pictures in those books kept the babies quiet for good chunks of time. No matter that my back ached from sitting awkwardly, or that several years later I can still recite, from the memory of sheer repetition, every wildly colored page of the silly, rhyming tale “Giraffes Can’t Dance,” stories were comforting to us all.

We’ve moved on to other favorites, and those babies last week completed kindergarten, where their teacher read aloud each day at snack time. She started with “Charlotte’s Web,” written more than half a century ago by master storyteller E.B. White, one of my favorite writers – both for his beloved children’s classics and his skillfully composed essays.

Each day on the way home, the kids tell me what happened at school – what games they played at recess, what cool project they did in art class, what they wrote in their journals. When they started “Charlotte’s Web,” that story was added to the mix: “Mama, today in ‘Charlotte’s Web’ they went to the fair,” or, “Charlotte laid her eggs,” or, sadly, “Charlotte died.”

When the kindergarten class moved on to the “Little House on the Prairie” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, my mother dug out the books I’d had as a child so I could reread them as the kids were hearing them in school. They loved that I was reading the same story they were. I loved revisiting a favorite from my own childhood and found it just as engaging, entertaining, and educational as it had been decades earlier during my first read of “Little House.”

The after school conversation evolved from, “Mama, today in ‘Little House on the Prairie’ they lost their dog Jack, and when then they found him Laura thought he was a wolf,” to, “Mama, did you get to the part where Pa saw the wolves?” Instead of the kids telling me what had happened, we were experiencing the story together.

My children have started to read on their own. It’s hard work, learning to read, but the reward is great. As with all good stories, “Charlotte’s Web” and “Little House on the Prairie” offer glimpses into another world – the farmyard and country fair of a half century ago and the dense forests and wide open prairie land of the frontier days. Sometimes the kids make up their own stories, from the pictures in books or the depths of their limber imaginations. When they are tired or bickering with each other, hearing stories read to them still soothes them – and me. Selecting a bedtime story is a cherished part of the day for each child.

Finding knowledge and wonder within the pages of a book is a familiar part of life for my kids, and I hope it always will be. Some of my happy memories of childhood are lazy, hazy summer days spent swinging on the hammock, book in hand, or holed up in my room on a rainy day with a stack of Nancy Drew mysteries for company and entertainment.

I still like my stories best from the paper pages of a real book, and as summer starts, I wonder what stories I’ll discover in the coming months. We’ll all begin together, my children and I, with “On the Banks of Plum Creek,” picking up where their kindergarten teacher left off, leading us into our summer reading.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings from a full life. This essay also appears in the June 21, 2013 edition of the Record-Littleton.