Flying Solo at Bedtime

We had a busy day getting ready for Grandma so we skipped swim. Despite that, I got Wee Laddie’s nap all screwed up. We just had lots of little errands to run and they took a long time. The hardest one was laundry. We haven’t bought a washer & dryver yet (Allen’s perfectly willing to do *all* the laundry on base—except for this time ‘cause he’s out of town & we need clean sheets for Grandma—so I’m not going to complain about not being able to do it at home.) so we do it on the base. There are currently 6 THOUSAND soldiers here (as in extra soldiers… beyond the ones that are normally here) for training. As you might imagine, some of them also had laundry to do today. We did manage to get the errands all run.

That all led to a late nap, which nearly always leads to a rough awakening. I don’t know why that gets Wee Laddie so out-of-sorts, but it happens almost every time his nap is late in the day.

At bedtime, Wee Laddie was refusing to put his toys away, so he kept getting things taken away. He lost his car toys for a day, the “Cars” movie for tomorrow (I knew I could use that one since Grandma will be here and he won’t care about his movie)… when I brought out the big guns “if you don’t put them away by the time I get the dishes put away, I’m not going to tuck you in. You’ll have to go to bed all by yourself,” I was just *sure* I’d get instant compliance. But NOOOOOOOOO. This child of mine is definitely a child of mine. (Some sort of cosmic justice, I’m sure.) Once we’d gone *there* I was horrified at the thought of hours & hours of crying, with him not getting to sleep until midnight the night before we have to get up early to go pick up Grandma. But it went much better than I expected. He didn’t fall asleep until somewhere around 10pm, but he didn’t really cry at all. He got a little whiny a couple of times about me tucking him in and I reminded him that he’d had the choice to put his toys away. He also came out of the room a few times, but finally just settled down and went to sleep. Wow.