Bedtime, in the order we do it

My sister rang to ask what we do at bedtime, and I opened my mouth and could not say it in the right order. I could do it — I do it every night — but describing it turned out to be a completely different skill, which I found unsettling in a way I’ve thought about since.

So I wrote it down. This is it, in order, and the order is doing more work than anything else here.

It starts downstairs

At about half six the big light goes off and the two lamps go on and nothing loud happens after that. Nothing with a screen in it, either — that is the one rule of ours that has never bent.

This is ten minutes before anybody goes anywhere, and it is the part I would keep if I could only keep one. By the time the word “bed” is said out loud, the room has already said it. Most of the resistance we used to get was resistance to a sudden bedtime, which is not the same thing as resistance to bed.

Then, in order

Up. Bath if it’s a bath night, otherwise a wash, which counts and which they know counts. Pyjamas. Teeth. One book each, chosen downstairs before we came up. Then the light, then the same three sentences.

The books being chosen downstairs is a small thing that took us two years to find. Choosing a book at the point of the book is a negotiation happening at the exact moment your resources are lowest. Choosing it at quarter to seven in the kitchen costs nothing.

The three sentences are the same three sentences. I’m not going to write them here — they’re not clever and they’d look thin on a screen — but they’re identical every night and they haven’t changed since Nell was two, and Rowan learned them from hearing them through a wall.

The landing light

At an angle. A specific angle. There was a period of about six weeks where this was checked and re-checked and I lost patience with it more than once, and I now think I was wrong to.

It is not really about the light. A six-year-old who has been out in the world all day, being one of thirty, gets to control one thing at the end of it, and it is the angle of a door. That seems like a reasonable trade.

The two things we cut

Two books as a treat, on a Friday. There is no such thing as a one-off in this house — a thing that has happened once is a thing that now exists and can be argued for, and we spent a month arguing about a Friday.

And the extra twenty minutes for Nell, on the grounds that she’s older. Which is true, and which was lovely for a fortnight, and then she was so tired by the Thursday that the mornings fell apart, and mornings are worth more than evenings. She goes up at the same time and reads in bed instead, which gives her the thing she actually wanted, which was not the twenty minutes.

When we rush it

Every single time we have tried to do bedtime faster because we were tired, it has taken longer.

I have no theory about this beyond the obvious one: an abbreviated routine is an unfamiliar routine, and an unfamiliar routine gets tested at every step. The forty-minute version takes forty minutes. The rushed twenty-minute version takes about an hour and ten, and ends with somebody sitting on the landing.