Before I begin, I need to apologize in advance to my son Grant. Should this blog live another 10 years (it’s already been around longer than that) he will be an adult and will hopefully be able to laugh at what I’m about to tell.
Perhaps I should also apologize to Grant’s father, but he’s seen this day coming and knows there is only more to come. (The reason for this will be clearer later.)
So, okay. On with the story.
Grant loathes bedtime. I mean really deep down in his bones just absolutely hates going to bed at night. The kid can outlast his mother, which is saying a lot. This poses several problems, not in the least sleep deprivation, but let’s just say we’ve been dealing with this for the past two years and seem to have made very little progress. No matter how many chapters of Harry Potter he reads, no matter how many warnings of [fill in the blank] minutes before lights out we give him, he just can’t shut down until we start to threaten him with potential punishments that bring on tears and then finally he gives up.
Tonight was no exception. I thought we had success at 9:00. Then came 9:30 and he appeared beside me while I was walking on the treadmill (headphones blasting) and scared the crap out of me to tell me not to forget to wake him up at 7:00 in the morning. I told him that I’d wake him up at 7:30 since he was awake 30 minutes past his drop-dead bedtime. (He knows this rule, by the way.) He doesn’t like my response but goes back to bed.
At 10:00 I end my cool-down and all of a sudden there’s Grant again, complaining that he can see Dean’s light on in the room next door.
I’m about to remind Grant of all the punishments that will begin to mount if he doesn’t get his little butt back to bed immediately when Eric appears on the scene and takes the words right out of my mouth. And none too gently.
Eric takes bedtime very seriously. He gets up early. That means he goes to bed early, end of story. So at 10:00 at night he is all business and out of patience.
Then Grant loses it. He already weighed the outcome before he came down and figured we would take his side, so he’s outraged that we’re yelling at him. He can yell too. And at that moment he dug deep and screamed, “ARRRGHHH! I WOULD BE IN BED IF DEAN WOULD TURN HIS DAMN LIGHT OFF!!!”
It’s a very good thing he followed this with a very quick retreat back up the stairs. I took one look at Eric and we both cracked up.
This is the second time I can recall Grant slipping in a little profanity zinger. The first time was very memorable, indeed. (This is where I reveal he learned all the profanity he knows from his father, not his mother. Ahem.)
At any rate, I let him stew in his tears before I went up to his room with a piece of paper divided in two. One column said “Things that make me angry” and the other said “What I can do about those things.”
What the heck, we’re already way past bedtime.
Turns out, this little exercise was just what we both needed. I know for him, it’s most important that someone listened and we even had a laugh or two at the idea I wrote down in advance that we install an on/off switch on the back of his head.
Oh, the joys of parenting.
And now it’s way past my bedtime.
