Bedtime routine

The bedtime routine around here is exactly that - the same steps, in the same order, at (roughly) the same time every night. But somehow it always feels like Daddy and I are herding little tornadoes, trying to steer them in the direction of pajamas-teeth brushing-books-bed but inevitably backtracking and redirecting for snack-potty-drink-clean up. But once they finally have clean bodies, clean teeth, full bellies, and empty bladders, tuck in time is sweet!

I don't know how you do it when you have more kids in your house than you have parents. Except for the nights when one of us is out at Bible study, we usually take turns and one of us tucks one kid while the other of us tucks the other kid. It's a precious little bit of one-on-one time at the end of the day.

There are usually two books, although Grant often suckers me into three if he picked shorter books. Hope likes it if we read one, and she reads the other. I love lying there watching and listening to her read. It still seems so magical and amazing to me that she has learned how! After books we turn off the light, and in Grant's case we turn on the rain machine. We started using it when he was a baby, hoping it would drown out other noises and help him sleep later. It doesn't make him sleep later, but he likes the way it sounds. Grant always wants his song to be "Amazing Grace." Hope likes a little more variety - sometimes a hymn, sometimes mine and Daddy's wedding song ("You're the Inspiration" by Chicago), and sometimes "The Star Spangled Banner" or the "Marines Hymn." After a song, Grant usually tosses and turns for a few minutes and then falls asleep. He can certainly go to sleep by himself, but we usually lie with him and snuggle or scratch his back while he falls asleep. Hope usually gets super chatty and wants to talk endlessly about hypothetical situations or something that happened earlier in the day. She has always been such a deep thinker, and it tends to show at bedtime!
Half the time Daddy and I fall asleep with the kids for a few minutes, and stagger out of their rooms around 8:30. It's so routine, you'd think it would be a non-event. But every night we ask the other how tuck-in went with their kid, and there's usually something sweet or funny to relate about it. We still take them both to the potty one last time before we go to bed, maybe around 10:30. They don't wake up at all, and we carry them back and forth from their beds like little rag dolls. But it's a way to avoid waking up in the middle of the night, and it's a chance to sneak one last kiss. Most nights we take to the potty whichever kid we didn't tuck in, just to get that extra little bit of sleepy sweetness.
They probably view bedtime completely differently than we do, because they see us cracking the whip on getting through all the steps and getting to sleep. It is a tiring process, but also one of the best parts of the day!