What is bedtime with a three-year-old?
A. a 15-minute routine of bath, book and bed
B. a 30-minute routine of bath, book and bed
C. an hour and a half long bath, TV, book and song extravaganza to persuade the three-year-old that it’s time for bed
Want to guess which one describes evenings at ours?
7.30pm – Bath time! I offer Alex a bath for him to play with bubbles and various receptacles ranging from the container that used to house pineapple tarts to old bath gel bottles (meanwhile, all the bath toys are sitting uselessly in a corner). Every day he protests the washing of his hair. Some days I relent. If he has a bath it must be him that empties the bath of its soapy water. It must be him that rinses the receptacles and dumps them into the bath. After I dry him off he likes to do a little dance, naked, in front of the mirror. Oh yeah.
7.45pm – Time for TV. He runs to the sofa, expectantly awaiting Hi5, Timmy Time and Winnie the Pooh. Some peace and quiet for us during this time. This is also when we eat junk food for dinner e.g. McDonald’s or pizza that we don’t want him to see us eating. Sometimes we take turns to narrate what’s happening on the screen so he doesn’t just turn into a slouching sack of potatoes. Other times we’re exhausted and let him slouch into said sack of potatoes.
8.30pm – After a few time countdowns (’10 minutes left, OK? Then it’s time for bed! Five minutes left!’), we turn off the TV. Screaming and crying commences for about 30 seconds, which is our cue to go into his room, closing the door behind us. Lest we forget, he shouts “Inside!” He winds down and then, a minute later, opens the door, thus signalling HIS choice to start reading books. If we have guests in the house, he tries to usher everyone into his room to await his arrival. This strict adherence to his routines isn’t at all worrying, is it?
At the moment he has a favourite book he always starts with: a book of songs in French. He’s got into this routine of asking for all the songs even though he knows his father only knows a handful of them, but this teasing back and forth of “This one?” “I don’t know this one,” has become part of the bedtime banter. The first time I joined in on this and sang along with the two songs I know, his eyes lit up in the knowledge that there ARE shared songs between mum and dad, so now I have to be present for those songs every time.
After that he says good night to his father with a kiss and big hug. Then he reads a book with me before bed. Or two. Or five. It is tremendously difficult not to give in to his demands for yet another book. Partly because of the pleasure I get from reading with him and spending time with him after a day of work. But mostly because I’m too tired to argue. Finally, finally, we’re done with books, signalled by his request or more often my insistence that he has some water.
I shut off the lights and we lie down, him in his cot, me on the adjoining single bed. He exclaims about the glow-in-the-dark stars, so I start Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. This is not normally the first song we sing, and he shows his displeasure at this by singing nonsense words to the tune, so I trail off and wait for his usual requests. First ‘Next Song’ of course, a Mandarin song about a flower that looks like a butterfly. His other name for this song is ‘Ching Ching’ because that phrase is in one of the early lines. On the nights his father puts him to sleep he asks for it too, again teasingly anticipating his father’s “I don’t know it!”
Then ‘Getty’, also known as On Top of Spaghetti, in which he always punctuates the cheese line with “Yum yum YUM!” and then attempts to persuade me to replace all the last words with ‘chair’ rather than ‘floor’, ‘door’, ‘bush’ and ‘mush’ or at least get into a faux argument with him.
Next is “Hey!”, more commonly known as Rasa Sayang. He admonishes me if I sing too quickly. After that is our old favourite Zou Bisou Bisou, which he truncates and then he carries over the ‘bisou’ as the last sound of Skidamarink (he calls it Skimadadadoo), waiting for me to notice and laugh.
I sit up. “Time for sleep,”
“Mummy lie down.”
“I’m not lying down anymore. Do you want some water?”
“Wanna bit of water?” “Wheels on the bus?”
I sing with him in my arms. He joins in a bit with ‘swish swish’ and ‘beep beep’.
“Hickory dickory dock?” He makes the clock sounds in the middle of the song.
I make for the door. “OK, good night, love you!”
“Bye, see you soon, sound of a cat? Meow. Sound of a tiger? Rawrr. Are you a tiger? Yes. Sound of a dog? Woof woof. Good night. Je t’aime. Je t’aime. Good night.”
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Uma is a Malaysian working mum with a French husband and a toddler named Alex living in their fourth country together.
Image credit: Flickr user Peasap
