Bedtime

My children are older now.  "Older" meaning they can brush their own teeth, put on their own pajamas, even read to themselves.  And yet . . . bedtime.  Both awaited eagerly by a tired mom, and dreaded for the hour-long routine required to bed down the four of them.   All of the kids still get read to, even the twelve-year-old.  She and my husband are currently reading the Harry Potter books (she has read the whole series four times through, but really wants her dad to read them).  The fourth-grader became hysterical when I suggested that she was too old for Mommy to read to her aloud at night (hoping to cut about 15 minutes from the nightly routine).  So much for that.  The first grader has mighty reading requirements from her teacher so bedtime is when we get those pages in for her log.  And the Kindergartner, well, that goes without saying.

So I am heading upstairs now amidst a flurry of fighting over who gets to go first.  We tried a chart, keeping track of whose turn it is, but that often became moot if one fell asleep while waiting for me to get to them, or one was in the shower so I read to the "wrong" kid first.  We tried saying it would be whoever was ready for bed first, but that resulted in such dangerous mad dashes up the stairs while trying to pull the siblings down by their pants, and sloppily brushed teeth, that I gave that one up too.  I am currently taking it night by night, assessing who is ready, who is most sleepy, who is most cooperative, etc., and refusing to be drawn into arguments about fairness.  Fair is each one getting what they need, not each one getting exactly the same.