Operation BotBot

On Saturday night I was performing at a concert on the other side of England.  With Mark away at the moment this meant Alby spent the afternoon and evening with his buddy Kara.

When I stumbled home at midnight, shattered from the adrenaline of the day and the chaos of recent weeks it would be a bit of an understatement to say I was bemused to hear Kara tell me what a breeze Alby was at bedtime.

For Kara, Alby fell asleep on the sofa at 8:30pm exactly.  Kara carried him to bed and he snuggled into her shoulder before snuggling into his pillow.  At 11pm she heard his footsteps along the corridor and found him standing by the stair gate rubbing his eyes.  “Alby, it’s bedtime” she said.  “Yeah” said sleepy Alby, who waddled off back into his bed and fell asleep again.

Alby would never do this for Mark and me.  Okay, Mark and I aren’t going to just let him fall asleep in front of the TV every night. But I was left with the definite feeling that things need shaking up a little bit.  And that the shaking mostly needs to come in regards to Alby’s love of his botbot.

Whether motivated by change or driven by exhaustion that turned my brain to mush, last night I confess I went for the tough love approach.  But you know what, I’m no good at tough love.  If I were the parent of two little ones like some of my friends then survival instinct would probably give me the motivation needed for tough love but nah, 12 hours of hardness and I’ve already withered.

And so today we went for the middle ground.  Jiggled the routine, made Alby his own “bedtime book”, hid his real bottle until the very last moment and stuck to my guns.  And Alby went down like a star.

I’m not patting myself on the back just yet.  We’ve got the rest of the night to get though and I need to work out my game plan for the night time wakings.  Also, the first time Alby went to sleep in his bed he was asleep in minutes. Mark and I thought we’d struck gold.  One week on and things were back to the slightly more normal chaos.  Yes there have been things to rock the boat - Mark has been away a couple of times, I’ve been working overtime, a possibly growth spurt have led to Alby being the worlds most tired little chap in the world… But there are always things to rock the boat.  We’re trying to keep life as calm as possible and hopefully for the next few months we can all keep our promise of a calmer environment.  Time will tell!