Maternity 33

week 20: evening routine

It’s 5:30 pm and all hell breaks loose - parents are coming home from work (yes, in California we do make it home by then!), kids are tired, nanny wants to get out of there, dinner is not ready and everyone feels the pressure to catch up and “spend time” with everyone else. THIS IS NOT A LIFE! And this post is about how you can avoid most of the witching hour and truly enjoy these hours with your children.

If you work, chances are that 5 to 7 pm are your most reliable hours with your family. Colleagues aren’t sending out emails or asking for schedule changes, bags don’t have to be packed, phones aren’t ringing. Unfortunately, these hours can be very stressful if you don’t have a modicum of flow: i.e. if you are running from task to task without harmony, or time to breathe.

In our house, there’s always been set activities we try to perform each night (bath, dinner, books, bedtime for kids; dinner and conversation and relaxing for adults), but only recently have they started flowing together nicely. I attribute this entirely to a specific schedule we developed together and the acknowledgment that we need a third adult to help out. So our nanny now works till 7:30 pm.

The schedule idea came from observing parents of three children who still manage to have a social life! I noticed that they had super scripted rituals at night and that their children were in bed relatively early. When we had only one child, we would let him stay up till 8:30 pm. I think this is pretty common for new parents, who tend to fit their child’s rhythm to their pre-child life. Unfortunately, this just lengthened the witching hour as our son would be moody from 6 to bedtime.

The third adult idea came from living with relatives for the past two months, and recalling the utter exhaustion I feel upon returning from an intense day at the office. The third adult means you can focus on one task at a time. Here is how we do it:

Each adult takes on three tasks every night, in a succession of “shifts”. So we joke and call them shift 1, 2 and 3 (well, the others joke, I’m the task master). Shift 1, for instance, is bath time. One of us bathes the 3 yr old, one of us bathes the infant and one of us prepares dinner for both children. Upon completion of this round of tasks, we move on to the second shift. One of us feeds the 3yr old, one of us feeds the infant, and one of us tidies bathrooms and empties bags/strollers to prepare for the next day. By shift 3, we have entered wind-down time: one of us reads to the toddler, one of us puts the infant to bed and one of us cleans up the children’s dinner.

I have found that putting my infant to bed 15mn before my toddler works really well. I don’t know why, but she likes to fall asleep alone, and he likes coming into the room and being very quiet, so as not to wake her up.

I’d say that a set evening routine is a non-negotiable element of happy parenting. Even the most laid-back and unconventional parents end up adopting a bedtime schedule. As one of my friends remarked after being reminded that her schedule is at odds with her otherwise free-form parenting: “all I have is the schedule!’