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. 

Rooms of Their Own

They both looked a little forlorn at bedtime Sunday: my daughter all the way upstairs, a full story above the rest of us; my son tucked into bed in his usual place, but without the company of his twin sister across the room they’d shared since they were toddlers and had to vacate the nursery to make way for their baby sister.

We’ve been talking about separate bedrooms for months, and with our weekends free for the first time since Thanksgiving, we spent most of Saturday making the long-awaited switch. We muscled unwieldy furniture through narrow doorways and along stairways and tight hallways. There were beds to take apart and move and reassemble, heaping piles of clothes to relocate, and dust bunnies to sweep from the hidden corners where they’d long been hiding.

With all the heaviest lifting done, it was fun to watch the kids expand into their own spaces, arranging and rearranging toys and trinkets, putting things wherever they wanted without the potential of invoking a sibling-roommate’s ire.

Once my daughter was moved out of the shared bedroom and into her bright and solo realm upstairs, my son had an entire room to himself to organize. No more shared closet and dresser, plenty of space for spreading out the toys normally stuffed under his bed, a place for his saxophone and books.

Sharing a small bedroom had become harder the older and bigger the children grew, and the more assertive of their own individuality. There were arguments over whose mess needed picking up, who was standing in the way of the dresser when it was time to put laundry away, and who was just too invasive of the other’s personal space.

Along with the inevitable squabbling, however, there were also sweet moments of room sharing: the summer mornings when I’d find all three kids reading quietly together in one room or another, the happy playing of made-up games, the secret conversations in the dark when they were supposed to be asleep.

This move – like so many moments in the parenting saga – inspired mixed feelings for me. Even as I try to encourage my children to grow and find their own place in the world – OK, in this instance just their own place in our house – I find myself often inwardly begging them to stop growing up so darned fast! I want to nurture their growing independence and confidence, but at the same time I lament that I am, ever so slowly, moving further from the center of their lives.

This is what my mother would call giving children both roots and wings: roots so they will be secure in knowing where they come from (and where they can always return); wings so they are free to explore as they will, to find their own direction. It is a constant parental balancing act to locate that happy place between the root planting and the wing building.

My children are not babies anymore. This is no surprise to anyone, of course. But I am regularly shocked to notice how big they are, how much they are growing all the time. It seems both ages ago and yet not so long past that there were two tiny babies snugged into a crib next to our bed, then the nursery across the hall, then one more room down to make way for another baby. Now the three of them are spread throughout the house, testing their wings just a little bit, even as their roots grow strong.  

Saturday, the day of the big move, the kids were so excited about all the newness of the room shift, the novelty of all that extra personal space. Still, the older two decided to have a sleepover in my daughter’s new room. Despite their newfound liberation, it seemed, they were not quite ready to give each other up. They needed one more night in the same room. One more night of talking past lights-out, of waking up and knowing they were not alone.

Sunday they looked a bit forlorn at bedtime, but that could have just been a sentimental mother’s perception. My son had a great book to read and was soon contentedly lost within its pages. My daughter had all that space to enjoy and no brother to tell her when to turn out the light. Now, a few days in, everyone seems perfectly content.

We’d been talking about the move for months, and I know it was time. But I’ll miss the sound of their small voices floating down the stairs in the post-bedtime darkness – still the voices of children, still near enough for me to hold, still together – now that they’re in rooms of their own.  

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 April 8, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.

Separation Anxiety

Last year I bought alarm clocks for my children. The idea was that the clocks, set with a chirping bird alarm tone, would rouse the kids on school days, allowing me to evade the sleepy protests of, “I don’t want to get up yet. It’s too early.” That plan worked, most days. The other days I was calling upstairs to urge children from the covers, or going there myself to nudge them out of cozy beds and into school day routines.

Once upon a time... they all fit on my lap.

This fall, after a summer of lazy mornings, we left the alarm clocks idle and returned to the practice of me waking the kids, opening window shades to the weak morning light, bending down for quick kisses on slumber-drowsy heads. In the frenzied early morning rush, I breathe in the sleepy aura of my children before they fully emerge from their blanketed enclaves and feel my heart twinge a bit at how big they are becoming, how far away from the pillows their feet seem to be now.

How long will they let me do this, I wonder? Tuck them in at nighttime and wake them in the morning with a kiss? How many more years? How many more days?

My son, the tallest of my children, has grown higher than my shoulder. The littlest one is now up to my armpit. Two of my children will turn 9 years old in a couple of months, reaching that half-way point to 18, when they will likely fly the coop of home. I am becoming acutely aware that this magical time of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and easy innocent beliefs will not, actually, last forever. I find myself lately clinging for dear life to the fading smallness of my children.

They are at a point now where they are apart from me more than they’re with me. They are at school or with friends, exploring on their own or together, or simply holed up in their rooms with a good book and a hearty dose of imagination. They do not need to know, as they once did, where I am at all times. More and more, the stories they tell are accounts I am hearing for the first time, not things we have experienced together. I am thankful they still share these what-happened-today tales with me.

I remember, not so long ago, feeling a vague sense of relief as the children reached early milestones. When they first slept through the night. When they were potty trained and we, finally, no longer needed to order diapers by the case. When they figured out how to make their own toast in the morning or slap peanut butter and jelly between two slices of bread and call it lunch. When they could ski on their own, without me holding them, and ride their bikes without training wheels. When they learned to communicate in words spoken and write notes in perfectly imperfect child’s handwriting and read words from a page all on their own.

Those were all liberating – for me and for the children. That is, after all, a main objective of parenting: to encourage independence in thought and action and to help children, gradually, achieve their ownness – their own voice, own path, own happiness. Even as my heart aches at how much and how quickly my children are growing, it fills, too, as they continue to discover and embrace their own personas, always reaching toward the next milestone.

The truth is that at some point my children’s paths and their happiness will be far less wrapped up in mine. Someday, if I do this right (and probably even if I don’t), my children will go out into the world without me. They will, essentially, no longer need me. But for now, they still do, even if it is not as complete a need as it used to be.

We have progressed through many changes, including bedtime routines. First there was rocking to sleep with the nighttime feeding. Then reading bedtime stories with three children nestled, somehow, together on my lap. For a while the children wanted lullabies and happy things to think about and exactly five Mama kisses before they drifted off to sleep. The littlest one still requires a spider check before she is tucked in, to ensure there are no creepy-crawlies lurking in the corners of her bedroom, and she often requests extra hugs and kisses and invents reasons to prolong the tucking-in process.

Most evenings, we all still read together, although the children sit around me now; they are too big to occupy my lap anymore. Then off they go to their own rooms and their own books to read. The older two are often so engrossed in whatever they’re reading that they are reluctant to pause for a bedtime hug. But I sneak in there anyway, maneuvering between child and book, pilfering all the hugs I can, for as long as they’ll let me do it. 

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 November 13, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.

Swirling August

The summer my youngest was a baby and the older two clumsy toddlers, it rained. A lot. Nearly every day, for weeks. I finally sent the 2-year-olds outside, wearing nothing but rain boots and giddy grins, to play in the giant mud puddles on our driveway, while I sat on the front porch with the baby, glad they were, briefly, occupied.

Back then summer seemed to stretch toward an impossibly far horizon, with no swimming or bike rides or hikes – and plenty of sleep deprivation and diaper changes. I loved being with my children, but there was lots of space to fill around nap times, and that vast stretch of time often felt formidable. As one person told me, “The days are long, but the years are short.”

Now it seems the days fly right by, and summer is a whirlwind of activity. When we flip the calendar to August, I can feel summer swirling toward the final whoosh that will suck us into September.

One part of me is looking forward to returning to my regular work routine, having time to catch up on all that I’ve neglected these last two months. I spend a good portion of the summer figuring out how to meet deadlines with approximately eight dedicated work hours per week, plus daily coffee-fueled, early morning sessions. If you’ve ever tried to research a project or draft correspondence while attending to the endless (and beautiful) curiosity of an 8-year-old, handling (not always patiently) repeated requests for snacks from a constantly ravenous 6-year-old, and alternately admiring how nicely the children are playing together and breaking up squabbles over the most inane issues, you can relate to my summer work challenges.

Another part of me dreads the coming frenzy of September, with its return to school days and homework, soccer practice and schedules. In these waning days of summer freedom, I try to lock into my mind forever the image of my daughter running through waves, dancing with the summer sun. Of my son peering seriously into the water, his swim goggles pushing ears out at goofy, endearing angles. Of the littlest one, bright-eyed and squirming with delight as a hermit crab scuttles across her outstretched palm.

If you’ve ever lingered on the hot sand or in the cool river of a child’s summer, watched as they made some new discovery or conquered a new skill, tried to hold on to the enchanting and uninhibited giggles of children playing, you know the aching joy of watching – and helping – kids grow up. Too fast. Always too fast. The years, indeed, are short.

I am thankful that my work and my husband’s work allow me to spend so much time with my children, to have these summers for as long as they last. I know there are only so many more years when my children will want to share their adventures so wholly with me, when we’ll be mostly free to play and explore and make the summer days up as we go along.

At the start of the season, my kids were bursting with ideas of fun, summery things to do. Outings to rivers and ponds, new hikes and bike rides and old favorites, trips to the ocean, lots of ice cream. In June we jumped from school straight into soccer camp, which overlapped with a week of adventures with the California cousins. We spent July adjusting to these long days of changed timing and responsibility, closing out the month with our annual pilgrimage to Cape Cod, and returning home to wild days and late nights with the Tennessee cousins.

Now, in August, we are in the full swing of summer, but we know these days are numbered. Already, twilight arrives earlier each day, mornings hold a coolness they didn’t two weeks ago, and there is a telling twinge of fallish color creeping into the hillsides.

We’re cramming as much as we can into these last weeks before school. Camping out in the back yard, with the Milky Way wandering through the sky above our tents. Exploring new bike paths and swimming holes with friends we won’t see much once school starts, and venturing out with school friends we don’t see so often during summer. Wandering through the woods near home with the dog. Impromptu Lego sessions on the living room floor. Trips to the library. Soccer in the front yard. Maybe one more visit to the ocean, another hike, a few more swims in the river before it gets too cold – or we are distracted by other, non-summer, things. Before we shift from carefree summer back to the routine of fall.

I’m expecting that shift to be brutal this year, in part because my children, for the first time in their young lives, have taken to sleeping in this summer. We have essentially abandoned any pretense of a regular bedtime during these days when light hangs in the sky well past their school-year tucking-in time. Most days there is no pitter patter of not-so-little-anymore feet coming down the stairs until 7 o’clock. Some mornings closer to 8. There is no rush to eat breakfast or get dressed or put down the good book that kept someone up later than I know the night before.

I think we’re all in for the rudest of awakenings when their alarm clocks chime at 6:42 a.m. one Monday morning coming soon, marking the start of the first school day of the year and the end of summer. I keep thinking I should ease the kids into that first early rise, start getting them to bed earlier so that first day is not so harsh.

But these summer days of childhood are so sweet, so ephemeral. September will be here soon enough, with all its structured activity and responsibility and early mornings. Maybe it’s better to let the kids soak up all the sunshiny freedom they can, linger in bed a few more mornings, hold on to summer right to the last moment.

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 August 14, 2015 edition of the Littleton Record.