Priorities

The bedtime battles have returned. We are back to the nights of running up and down the steps every 10 minutes, bribing, threatening...one night I actually left the kids with nothing but the fitted sheet on their beds. No pillows, blankets, or stuffed animals. After some discussion, Evan and I identified two key rules, wrote them on a piece of paper, and hung them in their room:

1. Be quiet
2. Stay in bed

Every night, I remind Evan of the rules, usually by asking "what are the rules?" Tonight when I asked him, he started to go into a long rambling spiel about how it's hard to remember and maybe if I moved the nightlight closer to the sign he would remember them. I asked him who the quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles was and--without taking a breath--he rattled off all THREE quarterbacks (McNabb, Garcia, and Vick).

When you have knowledge like that, how can you possibly have room in your brain to remember how to go to sleep at night?