When the Kid was little, we both read her bedtime stories and shared the tuck-in routine. It was nice. When I started pharmacy school and she discovered being an insomniac no matter how early we put her to bed or how totally we attempted to exhaust her, I ceded all bedtime routine to my spouse. I always expected it to be temporary during school but then just-about-bedtime became my regular study group time so I would get cut short reading a story, crying would ensue, so I stopped helping with bedtime entirely. When Little Monster was tiny and during the summer she was zero, I would read her story and my spouse would read the Kid's story. Even as she started toddling I still helped with Little Monster's story, reading it ten times over while the Kid had her story read to her. Then rotations happened, I was gone for the year, and then I was hunting for a job or waiting in near-snarl suspenseful anxiety. I opted out of bedtime because I get super short-tempered when I'm tired and I am fed up (see: bedtime with a stressed anxious kid and a 2 year old for the definition of "things which push a parent to get fed up"). Now that I have the long-awaited job and things are almost settled, I had thought I would be getting back into bedtime.
Instead I am realizing that I am snarly and short-tempered when my feet hurt, as they do every day lately, and I make bedtime so much slower and incite triple the Kid rioting that my spouse does. I kind of hate that in the morning I'm the taskmaster who is hurrying the kid along and at night I am hurrying her along to bed so I can get some rest and we never have the chance to go her speed (because she ignores my prompts that would keep her on schedule and then demands a full hour wind-down starting 30 minutes after her bedtime. For now we just need to get through with as little tension as possible so I will continue to opt out of bedtime. Hopefully the solutions will present themselves soon.
