Putting Your Kids to Sleep

Kwabi is 25 months old, and I still lay down with him when he goes to sleep.
I wrote about this a while before, and justified my laying (lying? damn, I can never remember if it’s “laying” or “lying”) down with him at bedtime. It truly is our time to read books and cuddle, and it melts my heart when he grabs my arm and wraps it around his body and says, “Hold you, Mommy, hold you.”

But yesterday I was listening to the Rabbi Schmuley show on Oprah XM radio, and the show was all about putting your kids to sleep.

(To see Rabbi Schmuley’s tips on putting restless kids to bed, and to listen to a clip, click here:

http://www.oprah.com/article/oprahandfriends/sboteach/20080812_oaf_sboteach)

He’s a father of 9 kids (holy shit, 9 kids!), and he shared about putting his little ones to bed, and how when lays down with his kids, within minutes he is in a deep coma. He joked that in order to stay away, he puts a candle under his chin and when his beard catches fire when his head drops in a stooper of sleep, it wakes him up promptly. LOL

I laughed my ass off in the car, because that is me!! I lay down with Kwabi every night to read books, and then we turn off the light and cuddle, and no matter how much I try to stay awake, I end up falling into the same deep coma as Rabbi Schmuley, only to wake 1.5 hours later in a state of confusion and exhausion, and only want to go crawl in my bed.

The good part of this is that I am getting a good night’s rest on the nights it happens. The bad part is that anything that I have on my evening agenda (i.e. hobbies, time with Kwasi, paying bills, cleaning up, packing lunch, etc.) doesn’t get done, and I feel like the evening has been “wasted.”

So I have started to find excuses to leave the room after we have turned off the light–removing my contact lenses, going to check what time it is, etc. My goal is to get him used to having me leave the room, if only for 1 minute. After about that time, he starts to whimper, “Mommy!” And I scoot back into the room and he will ask me, “Mommy, what are you doing?” I then reassure him that Mommy is still here, that, “Mommy was just ________.”

Very soon I will try to leave him in greater lengths of time, maybe 2 minutes….and then 3…..

For some reason, hearing him cry for me while he’s lying in a dark room, I hate that. I know it won’t kill him to cry a little bit, but I’ve never been the cry-it-out type of mom. Although, once, during his nap last week, I laid him down in his room for nap and walked out. He cried for a good 5 minutes because he wanted me to lay down with him. After I went in 5 minutes later, he was out like a light, probably due to sheer exhaustion!

Maybe Kwabi is a little too young for me to follow Rabbi Schmuley’s advice to a “T” but I do find some validity in setting bedtime routines and being firm when you need to be.

The “Family Bed”

The one thing I don’t agree with, to a degree, is Rabbi Schmuley’s opinion that the marital bed should be shared only between a man and wife–NOT the kids. He says a “family bed” is not a good idea because of the affect it has on a marriage, and for the fact that there is a certain respect for the marital bed that should involve no one but man and wife.

I know people that have “family beds” and from what I have heard, it has been a positive experience. I guess they still figured out how to get it on while the kids are there!

Kwabi still wakes up anywhere between 3 and 5 a.m. and walks over to our room and climbs into bed. There are times when I wake up with my arm under his head and I have no idea how he got there. LOL It hasn’t disturbed our marriage. It’s actually very endearing to wake up and see him there, in between us, a product of our love, marriage, and live’s merging together. To sleep together, in such a vulnerable, tender state……how can that be so wrong, Rabbi??