When the children start to go to bed later

Since the summer holidays there has been a change to our daily routine.

Since the children were babies we have always done our best to preserve our child-free evening time. From their first few months we've put them down in their own bedroom to sleep at around 7-7.30pm. I must confess that this idea was mainly prompted by that book about baby routines which I'm not going to mention, as it was not at all helpful for my mental health with small babies. But although it didn't work well when they were babies, by the time that Mia had reached her toddler years we did have a pretty good routine with both them fast asleep by 7.30pm or so and a whole evening ahead of ourselves.

But we always knew that it couldn't last forever. We started a new routine a few months back where we still put them to bed at that time and let them read in bed for a bit before they went to sleep, and that worked really well. The bedtime routine was fairly straightforward, because they knew that the quicker they said their goodnights and got ready for bed, the longer they would have to read.

Over the summer however they got into the habit of staying up later most nights. Sometimes they would have a movie night, sometimes they'd be just chilling out reading or watching videos. Now that they are older they are more pleasant and fun to be around in the evenings, and especially with them at school all day I'm not quite so desperate for my alone time.

For the time being we have a bedtime of around 8.30pm, but I can see that it won't be long before it becomes 9pm, then 9.30pm, and soon they'll be going to bed after we do! It does rather mean that our evenings of watching television together are becoming much less frequent. Quite a lot of what we watch is not at all suitable for little eyes and ears, and I need to start watching something early enough that I can not be too late to bed myself!

I'm not looking forward to the teenage years when I can see us having to facilitate their social lives by dropping and picking them both up throughout the evening!