Bedtime

Bedtime. Some days it is a blissful event full of cuddling, reading stories, listening to the sweet goodnight prayer of an innocent child. And, some days it is the desperate cry of an exhausted parent to an over stimulated, over tired child to "just please go to bed". Can you guess what kind of bedtime we had tonight? Let's just say I worked about 9 hours today and considering I work with mentally ill adults, I felt like I spent most of those hours with emotionally underdeveloped teenagers trapped in very developed adult bodies.
And so we came to bedtime, half an hour late. I only yelled once. Which my son quickly asked me to apologize for; and when I did he sweetly said "I forgive you, I love you." But I did explain to my preschoolers that if "they wanted Mommy to be a nice Mommy they needed to stay in bed!" Needless to say, one did not. So after a couple of threats and bargains (I'll let you have cheese for breakfast) I succumbed. I let her cuddle with me on the couch while we watched today's rerun of Oprah. I let her wiggle and scratch till slowly her muscles began to twitch and relax, till her breathing became slow and steady and her little body got heavier and heavier. I love that when you can pick up a sleeping child and their arm falls without even a flinch, when you can lay them in their beds without them even knowing. So, maybe, bedtime was a little blissful after all.