Is your bedtime routine less than perfect?

Ready for Bed Week, where kids lifestyle company, Worlds Apart, encourages parents and kids to get their bedtime routine on track, couldn’t have come at a better time for us here at the Mediocre House as my daughter’s bedtime is turning into a bit of a nightmare.  My daughter used to be brilliant at going to bed.  Well that’s a bit of a lie as she didn’t sleep through the night until she was six months old.  Luckily though she would just wake up feed and then go back to sleep.  However, once she started sleeping through the night she was brilliant.  It was a bit of a party trick, we’d say time for bed and she would toddle off to the bottom of the stairs wanting to go, people were absolutely amazed.

But, that has all changed recently; we’ve always been sticklers for routine, bath, milk, stories and bed as we value our adult time in the evenings.  However, now when we put her to bed she doesn’t stay there and has worked out how to get out of her room.  We did the rapid return thing taking turns, briskly taking her back and it usually worked after a while.  However, she’s starting to wear us down.  She now she sneaks downstairs and sits at the bottom behind the door.  You may not approve but we’ve taken to ignoring her and we’ve found that she’ll eventually take herself back up to bed.  Result!

On the other hand, she has taken to sleeping with the light on, well her illuminated globe and we have to sneak in, hoping not to wake her and shut it off.  We find if we don’t she gets up in the middle of the night and starts wandering around the house getting into all sorts of mischief.  So, we were over the moon when we were asked to review the lovely new Disney Princess Go Glow Story Projector.  It’s a 3 in 1 rechargeable night light, torch and projector. It just arrived yesterday but she loves it.  She toddled straight off to bed armed with her new torch to show daddy and didn’t come down once, bliss!  Plus, we didn’t have to sneak in and turn it off!

More information about the Ready for Bed Week can be found here www.readyforbedweek.com. It features tips and advice on bedtime routines and the more families they get to download the bedtime reward chart from the site, the more help Worlds Apart can give to the Sleeping Children Around – the global charity which provides bed kits for children who don’t even have a
comfy place to sleep.