sunburnt wheatgrass

I’m willing to place a pretty substantial bet that there is some kind of natural law in the universe that kicks in when children enter their school-aged years.  On nights where Enna has school the next day bedtime is at 7:30, and we’re fortunate that they don’t really fight it, often times (like all last week) both girls took at least a good half hour to fall asleep. A couple of nights they both didn’t fall asleep until 8:30pm, lying in the beds talking or singing to themselves. Since Enna has learned the days of the week in Spanish she recited and sang them so much that Ennyn now knows most of it too. Monday to Friday this past week we’ve let them both sleep until the last possible minute, resorting to my repertoire of random morning happy upbeat songs to wake them up at 7:20.

Now with Enna in school we’re a bit looser on bedtime Friday evenings, letting them stay up a half hour later and sleep in to whenever they get up in the morning. And this is where that universal law kicks in. Last night we had some good friends from back in Yucan’s seminary days, drive down for the weekend to visit and speak at Ethnos on Sunday. Their two kids are within months apart from both of ours and we thought they’d happily play until later in the evening. At 7pm Enna came over to me saying she was grumpy and tired, ready to take a shower and put her pjs on. By 7:30pm as we were saying goodnight to our friends, Ennyn went around to turn off the lights in the living room and dining room, leaving us in complete darkness. Without any parental prompting, the girls turned on the stairway light, closed the door on our friends and headed upstairs to bed. So much for staying up a little later to chat with old friends!

Hoping they’d follow the week’s routine of sleeping until close to 7:30 I had hoped for a quieter Saturday morning. At 5:30 Ennyn woke up proclaiming, “I’m all done sleeping. I want to go find Daddy and play downstairs.” Sometimes when she wakes this earlier I can coax her back to sleep, but as I made her lie in bed a bit longer she started singing, and then making up her own rhymes (Mommy, frog and bog and log rhyme!). By 6:15 I resigned myself to the fact that I was not going to get to sleep in peacefully and sent her off to her heartfelt desire of finding Daddy and playing downstairs. By 7am Enna was awake and I left for the gym for some Saturday morning quiet time.

I remember my mom complaining about this unspoken universal law when I began school too, going to bed and waking up early on the weekends and having to do all she could to get me to sleep and wake me up on school days. I find it amusing that most parents want their younger children to sleep in more, only to fight against them in the teenage years where sleeping to noon becomes the norm. This leads me to another parental universal law: when it comes to our kids, we parents seldom seem to get what we want when we want it. Now where’s my diet coke with extra caffeine?