Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle) (17 page)

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Authors: Alex McCord,Simon van Kempen

BOOK: Little Kids, Big City: Tales from a Real House in New York City (With Lessons on Life and Love for Your Own Concrete Jungle)
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Chapter 10
 
You’ll Give in Before I Do!
 
The Art and Warfare of Bedtime
 
In 2008 we went through a gut renovation of our home and the boys had to share a room for over a month. For the most part they enjoyed being close, but at times they got on each other’s nerves.
Johan: I want to go up
Alex: Where?
Johan: To the top bunk
François: No I’m on the top bunk
Johan: I WANT THE TOP BUNK!
François: NO I WAS HERE FIRST!
Alex: Johan would you like to sleep with Mommy and Daddy?
Johan & François: YES!
Alex: Four of us won’t fit. François, you slept with us last night so it’s Johan’s turn
François: (Screaming) You hate me!
Alex: Actually I love you How about you sleep on the bottom bunk—that way I can snuggle with you for a few min utes now plus you’ll be close to the ground and can run into our room if you wake up early
François: OK
Alex: So Johan you may have the top bunk
Johan: Yippee!!
 
As our boys have grown they’ve continued to sleep well and we know we’re fortunate—I’ve heard horror stories about kids who don’t sleep. From birth we were very laissez-faire about sleeping/crying, and sort of followed our instincts with a little validation from Dr. Michel Cohen (
The New Basics
). The end result? Two healthy sleepers who, after the negotiation of who is sleeping where, what PJs are worn, which stories are read, in which order and language, drop off pretty quickly once the lights are off.
Once the boys moved into portable cribs, we started putting them down with a bottle of water. Having heard cautionary tales about tooth decay, I can count on one hand the times the boys fell asleep with anything other than water in the bottle, and that was always by accident. Both kids grew to reach up their hands for the water bottle, and even years later at four and six they have squeeze bottles of water available at their bedsides. We did briefly take them away when transitioning between nighttime pull-up diapers and no diapers, but as soon as they mastered getting up to use the potty, we returned the water.
 
Simon
Negotiating with children is the art of (sometimes) letting them feel that they’ve gained a concession while unbeknownst to them having them end up at the same place. As soon as François could both express himself and use reason, I became a great proponent in using reverse psychology. Now, as he gets older, he’s more and more seeing through said psychology. Fortunately he’s not querying it for Johan and so I reckon I’ve another 18 plus months to continue it on him.
François: I don’t want to go to bed yet Daddy
Simon: Oh, that’s fine. You don’t need sleep. The rats the ghosts and the ghouls told me they wanted your company tonight Where shall I tell them you’ll meet them?
François: Dad I’m feeling tired
Simon: ‘Night son!
 
Alex
This is not to say that getting to the lights out part every evening is easy… far from it. Our biggest challenge is winding the boys down at night—we typically “come home” at 6:15 p.m., Simon from his office and me from either the home office or various meetings, and they are ecstatic to see us and bounding around like adorably hyperactive puppies. The next hour is a race to get dinner on the table for them and us, and then into the bedtime hour to have them asleep between 8 and 8:30 p.m. They never want to start reading stories because they know it means bedtime is nigh, and once we start reading they never want to stop because they love it (actually, so do we). We found it’s best to keep an eye on the clock and start moving them toward their room(s) about 15 minutes before we want to start reading, giving 10- and five-minute warnings until “get in your room” time. I wish I could say we’re wildly successful at this, but mostly we’re not. It’s always a struggle to get all four family members to sit down to dinner in time to be finished by 7:30 p.m. Simon typically walks in the door still working from his BlackBerry, and likes to sit down and relax before eating. My time is divided between making dinner for the family quickly enough that no one goes around looking for snacks. Snacks and TV are the death knell for an on-time lights-out. Snacks spoil dinner and if the TV goes on, parents start talking to one another and debriefing the day, and dinner gets pushed back another half hour. Why is this important? The kids get very cranky if they are rushed through bedtime. It’s important and valuable to have 40 minutes of conversation and stories read as well as teeth brushing and dragon-slaying. Slaying the dragon is our family euphemism for using the toilet (drowning the dragons that live in the sewer) and is fun for the boys to talk about, though probably not forever. Hmm, perhaps I should delete this—I don’t want obnoxious classmates getting hold of this book in 10 years and asking the boys if they need to slay the dragon in the middle of geometry class. On nights that we find ourselves stuck between canceling story and talk time or getting the boys to bed late, we always get tears and tantrums in lieu of stories, so we do our best to start the bedtime routine as early as possible.
Although we try to calm them down over two hours, sometimes we’ll get to 8 p.m. and they’re still on speed. Five books later, François might be asleep while Johan is bouncing up and down on his bed and singing at the top of his lungs. At that point we normally remove Johan from the room and let him wind down a little, then try again. We’ve also occasionally succumbed to our own exhaustion and simply lay down to sleep ourselves. Whoever is still awake normally climbs into our bed after he sees us going to sleep. Now that François can read on his own, he wants to read to us before bed versus being read to. Johan has little patience for François’ pace and level of reading and would rather have us read him something more advanced than watch François read—with this we either split up the reading duties or stagger bedtime. The former works better than the latter!
It is getting a little easier as they get older. I remember lying on François’ bed for nearly an hour at night before Johan was born, and that could get painful, both emotionally and physically. We also had to police naps, and make sure that no sleeping happened after 2 p.m. or else we knew they’d be up until 10 p.m. Now they are both old enough to know they need sleep, which is something, at least. When they do get overtired and cranky, I always remind them that they are cranky because they’re tired. Recently I was exhausted and snapped at the boys for something relatively minor. François said, “Mommy, can you go to bed when we do tonight? You’re cranky and you need your sleep.” Out of the mouths of babes…
One of the most frustrating things about bedtime is that the boys invariably turn into great conversationalists as the lights go out. Each night when I give them a quick snuggle before leaving the room, I get questions such as, “What should I do if someone calls another kid ‘stupid’ at school?” or “How do I stop throwing tantrums?” These are things I wish they would ask long before bedtime, and it’s simultaneously a delaying tactic and a really interesting discussion.
Alex: Good night François (Begins to leave the room )
François: Wait!! I have a problem!
Alex: What’s that kiddo?
François: There’s going to be a battle on my bed!
Alex: (Suspicious ) Why?
François: There’s an orca and a dolphin on my bed and orcas eat dolphins (I glance over and amidst the 15 or so stuffed toys on the bed there is indeed a dolphin and a killer whale )
Alex: How about I take one of them with me?
François: I don’t know if I can sleep then!
Alex: (Thinking fast ) Just tell the orca that he’s a dolphin too and cannibalism isn’t allowed in our house
François: GREAT idea Mom—good night!
 
Bedtime away from home often winds up being easier for us—maybe it’s the excitement of a new bed. Everywhere we go, we take sharks and squishies. François has a plush hammerhead shark puppet and Johan a great white shark. They also each have a small lavender pillow tied in a bow that they call their “squishies,” presumably because they are, in fact, squishy. With those two implements, the boys are usually willing to be tucked into whatever bed is available as long as they know we’re nearby. The only time we get into trouble is when we’re in connecting rooms in a hotel. If there are two phone lines, the boys love to call one another. This is all fine and dandy until they wind up accidentally calling the front desk, room service or the business center.
We also have a few things we say to each other as we leave the room—we always say, “Good night, I love you, see you in the morning,” in both English and French. Also, for some reason we’ve been saying, “No monsters, no masks, no flippers, no ghosts,” with a response of “Yay!” for years. I have no real recollection of how this got started—it may have been by one of our au pairs, but in any case both boys and parents think it’s cute, so we always say it as we’re leaving the room and closing the door behind us.
Alex: Goodnight Johan I love you
Johan: I love the Grinch
Alex: Oh OK then (Walks to the doorway )
Johan: (singing out from his bed) And you too Mommy!
Alex: Thanks kid
 
Simon
All through my life I have never had an issue with falling or staying asleep—sorry, drug companies, but you’ll be getting no sleeping pill business from me. But where this has been a hindrance is when each boy was between two and three years old and required one of us to lie down with them after the bedtime routine to get them off to sleep. When this routine follows (and it usually does) an evening when the four of us have eaten dinner together, then more often than not I’ll fall asleep, too. Once asleep Alex knows it’s practically pointless trying to awaken me and so more often than not on nights like this I’ll sleep for three or four hours, squeezed into a twin size bed next to Johan. Eventually I awaken and stumble into my own bed. Invariably sometime through the next day I’ll realize I have a stiff neck, stiff back and resolve to not fall asleep with them, but to make it to my own bed before so doing.
 
Alex
So the cute little monsters are safely tucked into bed and we’ve tiptoed or negotiated out of the room. Now comes the fun in the middle of the night. No, I’m not talking about fun for Simon and me (see chapter five), but those moments when we are wakened from a deep sleep, or rather I am, as Simon sleeps like a corpse, to hear a screaming child. We only dealt with nightmares once or twice—a real anomaly for us—but we do sometimes get boys who have to hit the bathroom. I’ll never forget one night when François was just getting through nighttime toilet training. We had a potty next to the bed so that he could just roll out and take care of business. At the time we still used the baby monitor, and we smiled at each other in parental pride as we heard him get up, fumble around, urinate and get back into bed. A few minutes later I went to the bathroom myself and discovered that his bedroom potty was NOT in his room because it was in the bathtub full of disinfectant. The next morning, there was a wet spot on the floor next to his bed where the potty should have been. Oops. From then on, checking potty placement was added to the nightly checklist.
 
Sleepy Johan After a Nap
 
If the nighttime sleeps have been relatively painless for us, daytime naps have always been a different story. Here our kids are different: Johan loves his afternoon nap, and even at three and a half still liked a short one after lunch. François, on the other hand,
never
wants to go to sleep in the afternoon. At about age one and a half, we started having to wheel him around in the stroller to get him to sleep. It wound up being the only way, and I would structure my day around the noontime walk. If we didn’t get him to sleep between 12-2 p.m. or 1-3 p.m., he’d basically fall asleep standing up at about 4:30-5 p.m. and then would never want to go to bed at night. Not fun, particularly when I was freelancing and planned to do design work and take phone calls during those precious two hours. That’s one element of early childhood I was not sorry to leave behind. I also hated having to check up on our au pair with the naps when they were on duty. We discovered that it was very tempting for our 18- or 20-year-old au pairs to give up the fight at midday and just allow François to fall asleep later on. It was then our problem, not theirs, when we came home and had to put them to bed. During our weekly check-in meetings we often had to tell our au pair to stop letting him fall asleep so late, and one year it wound up being a three-way battle when I ultimately laid down the law. Funnily enough F-Bomb has become an ally in keeping his little brother awake. He’s learned that Johan falling asleep in the late afternoon is bad news, and thinks nothing of shrieking in J-Boy’s ear, pulling him off the couch and chanting, “Don’t fall asleep or I’ll eat you,” and generally making it impossible to doze off. Johan usually either starts pounding him or joins in the raucousness.

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