Endless Summer Evenings
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Thursday, July 08, 2010 6:35 PM
It’s past 8:30 on a typical summer evening, and do I know where my children are?
Sure. But where they are is probably not the same place as where they should be: in bed.
Here’s my true mom confession: in this season, my children do not go to bed “on time.”
I can name many reasons why this happens. The sun doesn’t set until 9:00, and it doesn’t get really dark until almost 10:00, so it’s hard to convince children to go to sleep, even with our heavy-duty blackout curtains. When it’s really hot, I don’t like to let the children out during the day, so the last hours before bedtime are their only chance for outdoor play. My husband and I enjoy the lazy summer evenings, and cool drinks and good conversation distract us from the fact that our kids need to go to bed.
Then, suddenly, it’s 8:30 and the children are still boodling around, with dirty hands and feet but happy faces. Their eyelids might be droopy, but they don’t care: they love summer too much to want to sleep through it.
It’s not like this when we’ve got a baby in the house. Last summer I had a daily battle to get little Blaise to stay awake until his 6:45pm bedtime, and we’d put 2-year-old Camilla down not long after that. Now that the baby is a toddler, though, it’s easy to let bedtime slide. And since my kids are able to make up the sleep - Blaise by taking longer naps and Camilla by sleeping late in the mornings - it doesn’t seem to adversely affect their overall restedness.
But I will say: my January self (who is a stickler about that 7:30 bedtime) is shocked at what my July self considers reasonable (9:30? Why not? It’s warm outside!).
What does summer do to bedtimes at your house? For sanity’s sake, do you have to stay strict? Or do your kids stay up late when it’s warm outside?
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