We’ve realized that our daughter has got this bedtime thing figured out. Bedtime is to be avoided. Anything that looks suspicously like preparations for bedtime is to be avoided. Pajamas are definitely to be avoided, as is Mommy, generally, since Mommy has been known to scoop her up and hustle her off to bed. She still thinks Daddy is the safer choice, but she’s discovering that Daddy is beginning to be just as suspect.

The parenting guideline for bedtime used to be that when Cora would get snuggly, that she was ready to be rocked and put to bed. She’d consistently snuggle in somewhere around 8:00, and then Mommy and Daddy would have the evening to themselves. As Cora’s gotten older, she’s become less interested in snuggling, and more interested in cramming every last bit of playtime possible into the day. Rather than snuggle, she dances out of reach, spinning herself into a frenzy of activity designed, we think, to keep her going out of sheer momentum. 8:00 slides past, and then 9:00, and then 10:00 – and still Cora will keep going. Momm’s ready to drop, but Cora will keep going.

And so we’ve discovered that we can’t rely on the signs from Cora to determine when she goes to bed. We have to impose our own bounds on her, partly for her benefit and partly for our parental sanity. We need time to be adults, to be adults not on toddler duty from the time she wakes up in the morning till past the time we ourselves ought to be in bed in the evening.

I bet we’ll discover lots of things like that, where parental guidelines have to be imposed, either for her sake or for ours. The thing’ll be figuring out just where those boundaries are, and why we’ve created them – to know when they’re of necessity hard and fast, and when they can be flexible. Letting her run free is no way to raise a kid – she’ll have no concept of how to fit in the world. But putting her in an iron box won’t help either – she wasn’t created to be a little automaton. Granted, those bounds and bonds will stretch as she can do more, knows more, understands more. We’ll need to figure out her place in the world, just as she is, and the challenge will be for us to keep in synch. We won’t manage it perfectly – sometimes we’ll be ahead of the curve, and sometimes she will. But for now, I’ll trundle her off to bed when we deem it necessary. And feel grateful that as yet she’s still a toddler, so our hardest decisions are bedtimes and mealtimes, what toys are appropriate and how much is too much, and when a minor illness warrants a trip to the pediatrician rather than just a big dose of love with a little dose of Children’s Tylenol.