Been trying to get to bed earlier so I can go back to waking up early like I did last year, but it’s just not happening.

Both little ones still sleep with us at night. Pia has her toddler bed right next to my side and Leif sleeps in between me and Thomas. We’d put them to sleep at around nine o’clock after reading to them in bed, then sometimes I’d even fall asleep before them, enabling me to get a good night’s sleep and get up between four and five in the morning. I intentionally had to do this to catch up on writing assignments for a creative writing course I was taking then. This started exactly a year ago and I lost my groove over Christmas break. I really want to get back into it.

Now that I don’t have an external force pressuring me to get things done on time on a regular basis, I’ve slacked. Now we put the kids to sleep upstairs in the Murphy Room (named for the Murphy bed in it) while watching a “boring enough” show that the kids don’t care watch.

It’s really dumb but it’s so easy. Thomas holds Leif on the gym ball and bounces him until he falls asleep (I know this is extra) and I badger Pia to stay lying down on the couch until she, too, eventually falls asleep. The only good thing we got going for now is that they’ve actually been falling asleep before nine o’clock! It’s helped that they’ve started summer school so we’re forced to stick to a schedule that gets them enough sleep for their tiny growing brains. Before that, during the lockdown, we were extremely lucky if they were out by ten. But again, that’s all on us.

I think it’s time we go back to reading bedtime stories to them IN BED and just weather through the tiring battle of keeping them down and on the bed, persistently shooting down their clever delaying tactics.

I know it doesn’t seem right that these two single-digit-aged munchkins should win over grownups, but at the end of the day, these three-foot monsters have a lot more energy and fight in them than we do. We just wanna relax already, have some peace and quiet. We give uuuuupppp…