Kids love playing on giant piles of plowed up snow.

By 8:45pm every night, I am mentally exhausted.  Do you know what it is that exhausts me so?   Putting the kids to bed!

Yes, we have four boys, but when it comes to bed time in this house we have two issues, one wild card, and one dependable sweetheart.

Can you guess which is which?

The sweetheart is John David.  Get him good and cozy, pop a pacifier in his mouth, and he is on his way to sleep.

Caleb is the wild card.  If he’s good and tired, then he and Joshua will talk for a few minutes, and then Caleb will go to sleep.  If Caleb goes to sleep early, that leaves Joshua to his own imagination for a while, until sleep starts to pull him in, and then he often has some anxiety.  However, if Caleb is all excited, there will be a party up there for them, and a headache for us.

Lately, though, our biggest bedtime battler is…..Daniel.

Oh, I love him soooooo much.  He is beautiful, he is helpful, he is darling, but at bedtime…..well, at bedtime he’s the kind of toddler that makes people eat donuts when they know that they shouldn’t!

I have never had a kid fight going to bed this hard!  O wait, no, that’s not true!  How soon one forgets.  Joshua was like this sometimes too, and I often had to stay by his side and rub his head until he went to sleep.  Now we are at this stage with Dan.

We have tried EVERYTHING.  Tonight, I finally ended up sitting with him and rubbing his head too.  A funny thing happened when I finally just gave in and stayed with Daniel and rubbed his head until he went to sleep:  I loved it.

Sometimes I do feel a little sad for him, losing his status as baby of the family this year, but let’s face it:  Daniel is seriously happy anyway.  That boy loves life, and if he just needs a little help going to sleep at the end of the day, that’s okay.  I can do that.

Now I don’t do that every night because it isn’t always necessary, but we do always have the hardest time getting that boy to stay in his bed and go to sleep.  He thinks of every excuse in the book:  “milk,”  “potty,” and if I go downstairs, he sneaks into his brothers’ room (that is, if it’s a Caleb party kind of night).

Oh well, at least for tonight we are done.  They are all in bed, and as far as I can tell, they are all asleep.  Alan and I are staying up watching the Bourne Legacy.  Gotta love those Bourne movies!  What is it that makes these movies so good?

I’m coming off of the bedtime stress.  Let me share some cutie pics with you:

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