Bedtime Squeak!

Consistency is the key to establishing a regular routine with kids and all parents can attest to the fact kids and consistency simply don't go together! Despite the odds, sometimes when you do manage to get your kids to follow a regular schedule, all it takes is a couple of days’ vacation for them to revert back to square one! The longer your vacation, the tougher it is to restore order at home!  Take for instance, Abhay who’s having problems with sleeping in his own room after sharing our bed in the hotel the whole of last week while we were on vacation. If only one week has upset his routine established over a few months, you can only imagine how crazy things were at home when we returned from a month’s vacation in India! I guess most Indian immigrant parents face this problem after a visit to India – smaller kids want to be carried all the time, bigger kids refuse to buckle up in their car seats, and all of them want to be pampered like they were back in India! 

In order get Abhay’s  bedtime business back on track, I read “Hide and Squeak” by Heather Vogel Frederick and illustrated by C.J.Payne. It is bed time and daddy mouse is trying to get his little one to bed who is seen playing “Hide and squeak” instead. As the daddy mouse chases him around the garden, up and down the stairs, in and out of the bathmat in the bathroom, baby mouse is relentlessly on the run. Daddy mouse’s reminder that ‘It’s time for bed and time for sleep and no more time for hide and squeak’, falls on deaf ears much like the way our kids ignore bedtime pleas!! Finally, daddy mouse catches up with the speedy little sprinter and gives him a kiss and a hug and tucks him in bed like a bug in a rug and that’s the end of “Hide and squeak"....or at least we hope so:-) If your little one plays "Catch me if you can" at bedtime......catch up with this book!