For the past several months, Zoe has had an interesting/strange bedtime ritual: after being put to bed, she pops up, wanders into whichever room we’re in, and watches us (sometimes with some tears) until she gets bored and heads back into her room. (We had tried a bunch of different tactics to get her to stay in bed, but finally decided that just ignoring her when she came out was the best approach. It was the only thing that didn’t send her into screaming fits – and we knew she would eventually go to bed on her own.) I assumed the ritual would be short-lived, but once this phase hit the three-month mark, and once Avery was born, I thought, “Enough is enough!” I wanted to put a stop to these visits.

One night last week I told Zoe at bedtime that she couldn’t come out of her room after I left. “You’re a big girl now, and big girls go to bed when they’re told,” I said to her. After a series of “why?”s and complaints, I told her she had to set a good example for Baby Sister. And I told her she didn’t have to stay in bed if she wasn’t tired – she could read or play with her stuffed animals, but she had to stay in her room. To my great surprise, Zoe listened: she stayed in her room (with a few reminders) that night, and she’s done the same every night for over a week now. I’m so glad this phase is over, and I only wish we had ended it earlier!

-M

This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 3:42 pm and is filed under 37.Two kids-August 09. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.