Today for Works for me Wednesday, I thought I’d let you in on a little treasure at our house: early bedtimes!! My daughter is 3 and my son is 1 – both of them are in bed by 7pm every night; in fact, AG used to go to bed at 6:30 and has just recently moved back a half hour! It is glorious. My children are extremely well rested, bedtime is a breeze because they aren’t overtired (bedtime meltdowns are rare at our house), and my husband and I have hours every evening to spend with each other!

Usually when we mention their bedtimes, people are shocked. The conversation usually goes in several predictable directions.

1. They must get up really early if they go to bed that early!
This is a widely circulated and believed opinion, but in my experience, it isn’t true. Actually, now that LB has outgrown his early waking stage, there are many mornings when our whole family is still in bed at 7:30 or 8:00am!! I know that you all hate me, now. The opposite has actually held true for us – if they go to bed later, they wake up earlier because being overtired actually messes up their sleep rhythms!

2. They must not nap very well.
Again, wrong. At almost 16 months, LB still takes two solid naps a day; AG usually still takes at least a short nap in the afternoon, and even when she doesn’t sleep she stays in her room for a couple of hours resting, reading books, and playing quietly. Again, the opposite has held true for us – if they go to bed later, they take shorter naps (or none at all), and then they’re even bigger beasts to deal with!

3. You’re just lucky
This is usually the conclusion that is drawn after the first two items have been discussed. Oh, I hate this one. Granted, our kids do very well with sleep – but please do not overlook the fact that they both are very strong-willed and things were not always like this! Mostly with AG, we battled through some extremely rocky patches with her sleep. We had to get really good at letting her cry, but it paid off in the long haul!!

I have discussed in the past how much we love the book Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Marc Weissbluth. I can’t recommend it highly enough! This one book gave us such a wealth of information and understanding of children’s sleep needs, and it has given us a reference point for how to have this kind of family schedule when it is certainly not the norm anymore! [When we were kids, it seemed like children typically were expected to go to bed at 7pm... either children's biological needs have radically changed in the last 30 years, or we're just not giving them the sleep they need!]

In a couple of weeks for Works for me Wednesday, I’ll tell you how we handle having a social life with our kids going to bed that early. ;)

I’m no expert, and every kid is different. But I can absolutely say that Weissbluth’s research in Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child has worked for us! For more “Works for me” tips, head over to We Are That Family!

Remember last week’s tackle when I cleaned out the master closet? I had some extra motivation to tackle our closets (the kids’ closets and dressers were next, although not nearly as dramatic!) – I was preparing for our church’s first clothing and toy swap!

I have been thinking about an event like this for quite a few years, actually. We get lots of hand-me-down kids’ clothing, which has been such a blessing to us – I’m not sure what in the world they would be wearing without these much appreciated boxes of blessings! Our ABF is pretty good about sharing clothes with one another, but I thought it would be great if we could open it up to a church-wide swap. Especially during difficult economic times, knowing that many are on reduced incomes or have lost their jobs entirely, this is a very practical way for the church body to care for one another.

We asked that anyone interested in participating drop off any gently used clothing (washed and sorted by size) and toys that they were ready to part with at the church on Friday evening. We set tables up and labeled them according to gender and size and set all the clothing out on them, and also had toy, book, and baby item areas. On Saturday morning the room was open for everyone to come “shop” for free!

I came home with some clothing and some little tikes gems: a see saw (which is shaped like a fish and hence has been named “Moby”), a xylophone, and a dishwasher/sink for AG’s kitchen!

We didn’t have as many people participate as I had hoped – next time we do this I hope more will join in. That is not to say that we were lacking donations – wow, did we have a lot of stuff! However, the ratio of what was brought to what was taken was way out of proportion – we had so much left over!

It did not go to waste – the children’s clothing was boxed up and taken to family services for foster kids, the adult clothing and baby items were put into the closet for a ministry our church has to families in need, and the many, MANY toys that were left were trucked over to Salvation Army.

Lessons learned:
1. We need more than two women to man this event! We were expecting to have more of our women’s ministry committee there, but almost everyone ended up being out of town or unavailable for other reasons. This was a lot of work – if you do this at your church be sure to have adequate people on hand, especially for clean up. We really underestimated how much there would be leftover that needed to be dealt with before we could even consider cleaning up the room and setting up for children’s church the next day! By God’s grace we somehow accomplished this with 2 people in about 2.5 hours… and I thought I would sleep for the next two days!

2. Advertise, advertise, advertise. Even though the response from the church was much less than I had hoped, it was worth it because we had at least one mom come who does not attend church anywhere and said she is considering coming to the church, now! Next time I would love to open this up more deliberately to the community. What a great opportunity to show God’s love! The little boy of the woman I mentioned actually came up to me on Friday night and said, “Why are you doing this?” What an excellent question! :)

Have you ever attempted (or attended) a swap like this? Please share your gems of wisdom! :)

I hope you all had an enjoyable Memorial Day yesterday! We packed up and headed out to the Memorial Day parade with anticipation running high – we were going to see a marching band! We went to the 4th of July parade last year and had really talked up the marching band to AG – we had been talking a lot about instruments at the time and she was very excited to see them in action. Alas, we learned at the parade that there is no marching band in the 4th of July parade, although they do march in the Memorial Day parade! A mere 10 months later, the dream was coming to fruition! :)

We got to the parade route a little early and enjoyed some homemade baked doughnuts that I had pulled out of the oven and coated with butter and cinnamon sugar just before we left the house. This should surely become a tradition – they were yummy! Want to try some? You can find the recipe here.

Near the start of the parade, LB somehow rocked the umbrella stroller he was sitting in right over the curb and landed face down in the street!! This was obviously surprising and scary for us and everyone watching, but LB never made a peep! The stroller must have taken the brunt of the fall, and he was completely unfazed… although all the people around us surely were questioning our competence as parents after that ordeal!

No injuries, so on with the parade! Indeed, there was a marching band! Hooray! Even better, in my opinion, was the long line of tractors. I do love a good local parade with copious amounts of lawn tractors! Hilarious!

After the lawn tractors, of course, came every firetruck and ambulance in the town. On the way to the car, AG and I were discussing that these people help us if we have an emergency, and that if we need them we can call 9-1-1 on the telephone and they will come right away. We went over this multiple times, and when we got into the car, I told her to tell NP what we can call if we need someone to help us. She didn’t even hesitate and said oh-so-very-confidently, “We can call 8-6-1.” We just about fell on the floor laughing – hopefully we won’t be dependent on her to call for help in an emergency!!

We had a wonderful remainder of the morning and early afternoon with the kids’ “pretend grandparents,” and bought some annuals and did some planting before the day was over.

Hope you had a wonderful Memorial Day! Now that summer has “officially” begun, check out my friend Julie’s blog this week as every day she’ll be sharing strategies for spending more time with the Word this summer, along with some favorite summer recipes!

My daughter’s Sunday School teachers, bless their hearts… she hardly ever speaks in class because she is so shy, but I fear that when she does it is strange!

A couple of months ago her teacher (who I know well from Bible study) told me that they had been discussing trusting God when we’re afraid. She asked them what they were afraid of, and in typical 2 and 3 year old fashion, the answers centered on normal things like the dark and thunderstorms. But then my AG, who never speaks, got very animated and was exclaiming about being afraid of… cows! Yes, I traumatized her a year ago by taking her on an “educational” trip with her cousins to a large dairy farm – she has never fully recovered from her terror when we went down into the “parlor” while the cows were being milked. Obviously her teacher did not know the background to this, so it seemed a little random to be afraid of bovine.

Today they were discussing praying. I asked AG what they were praying about and she said, “I wanted to thank God for my pretend kitties.” “What did your friends thank God for?” “Their mommies and daddies.” So, now I have the child who is afraid of cows and deeply thankful for her pretend kitties. Makes a mommy proud.

I guess this is deserved… I vividly remember thinking it was my job to go talk to my first grade teacher every time I was done with my seat work and the other kids were still working. I’m sure she loved that. I recall one day telling her a long story about how I had once stepped on a nail, and then removing my shoe and sock at her desk to show her the scar. Mrs. Herbert, wherever you are, I apologize.

On a serious note, I just read a few blog entries that I recommend you take a few minutes to check out!

Monica over at DailyDwelling posted today about her husband’s return home after a 14 month deployment in Iraq as an army chaplain. The pictures are killer – be prepared! Praise the Lord for bringing our soldiers home safe and sound!

Joy at The Stay-at-home missionary posted about her husband’s safe return from a 10 day trek through the jungle by foot and boat (he is a missionary pilot). Take a few minutes to read it and her husband’s post about his trip. Praise the Lord for faithful workers in His harvest fields!!