I can hear my daughter trying to sneak out into the hall. My guess is that she is trying to read her book by the light of the bathroom, she is setting up tea time for her animals or she is trying to see if by chance I left the iPad in our bedroom.
She is by all essentials a night owl.
Tonight (like most nights) I know she will collectively come out to check on me/complain of a stomach ache/be thirsty/need to tell me something/ask me to tuck her in/ask me to sing her one of our favourite songs/talk about the day.
It drives me ba-na-na-s.
In trying to maintain a disciplined approach to getting her to bed, we give her warnings. A gruff voice. Threats of losing privileges. We get cross. We talk about being up for school & the importance of getting good sleep. None of these seemingly fine tactics ever quite work with her.
It’s a battles of wills, which eventually one of us wins. Either her falling asleep and us exhausted from the process.
What we have come to realize is that our daughter is quite simply..a cuddler. For her to drift off into Neverland, she seems to need someone close. And to STAY in Neverland, she often shows up in our room in the middle of the night, looking for that need to cuddle to help her ease back to sleep.
For the longest time, I questioned if by allowing her to stay in bed with us or by one/or both of us moving – (yes there have been more than a few nights of BOTH kids showing up in our room) are we doing them a disservice?
I want them to grow up comfortably independent. Learn how to be autonomous and all that jazz. However, in the need to guide our kids to grow up strong, have I forgotten what it was like to be 7 years old? Have I gotten too caught up in the lesson & missed paying attention to a human aspect of growing up? At some point in time, we have all been afraid.
I remember those nights. Whether it was The Goonies, Gremlins or Ghostbusters, you bet your life I was in my parent’s room at some point unwilling to close my eyes afraid at the images that lay before me as I fell to sleep.
I can’t tell you as often as I would like what bothers my little girl but I do know that her imagination is a good one. She is an old soul, a complicated kid and I imagine her creativity brings forth images that could be just too much.
So as I focus on being mindful in 2015, I will take a moment to hear more about her fears & in those times, rather than trying to force her to go to sleep, I will simply offer her a cuddle.
You know, my daughter was an old soul like that and I finally decided that she would eventually reach an age where she would consider herself “too grown up” for cuddles and sleeping in her mommy’s bed. So I just embraced it for the time it was happening. I think she’s turned out pretty well. 🙂
We all probably could use more cuddles, but kids especially. They seem so grown up sometimes we forget they’ve only been here a short while.
Great post!