The Big snuggle-up!

Most of self-help books on babies and parenting have more than one chapter dedicated to bedtime! It certainly helps to get an expert perspective on how put your little one to bed and ensure he or she stays there! That said, no one is a better expert that you on what works for you and your baby! Isn’t it?? J Having been through different phases of the bedtime business myself,  the good news is that while the ladder to sleep gets shorter as your little grows up, but the bad news is that the climb isn’t any less treacherous!  You may progress from setting up the white noise machine to playing soothing music, from chanting shlokas to singing lullabies yourself, from reading books to letting them read on their own……and yet they would still want to snuggle up to you for…… juuuusssst five minutes that at times may stretch up to the entire night! J

An absolute must read for bedtime is the classic “Goodnight Moon” by Margret Wise Brown and pictures by Clement Hurd which makes a perfect setting for bedtime and you can almost feel the night closing in on you!

Does your bedtime reading feel like forever with your little one not satiated with a book or two? We again read “Interrupting Chicken” by David Erza Stein, a 2011 Caldecott Honor that best illustrates the unenviable state of parents who have their kids interrupt at every juncture of the bedtime read making it a never ending story…..and the parent is seen dozing off only to have the little one completing the story!

We have the home grown Baby Bahadur series with titles “I'm so sleepy” and “Snoring Shanmugam” by Radhika Chada and illustrated by Priya Kuriyan and the recent read Junior Kumbhakarna by Arundhati Venkatesh and illustrated by Shreya Sen.

Today we also read “I’m not sleepy and I will not go to bed” a Charlie and Lola story by Lauren Child. Charlie’s little sister always stays up late and so their mom enlists Charlie’s help to get her to bed. So Charlie goes through what every parent in charge of bed time routine suffers through! Lola refuses to go to bed and plays mischief at every juncture of the bedtime routine from bath time to being tucked in! So Charlie plays along with her and offers pink milk Tiger soft toys, pretends to have his toothbrush gobbled up by her lion, and shoed off the whales from her bathtub and played hide and seek with her doggies to fetch her pyjamas….until he almost gives up when Lola is finally seen fast asleep in her bed, after having tucked her hippo in Charlie’s bed!  This book only underlines the most proven mantra of bedtime routine –“Just go with the flow ..……and they’ll be zzzzzing in no time”! J