I have always been a person who needs a lot of sleep. When I was in high school, long past the age of a set bedtime, I went to bed at 9:30pm on school nights. My freshman year in college I foolishly scheduled an 8:00am class, and it took me all of one week to vow never to make the same mistake again. My only saving grace then was the couple of hours’ naptime I managed to carve out between my last class and the time I had to be at work. As an adult, my only “real” job saw me working swing shift–from 3 in the afternoon to 11 at night–and that suited my need to sleep in perfectly.

What it didn’t suit perfectly was implementing a “normal” schedule for a small child. When Lydia was small and I was still working, I would pick her up from my mom’s sometime before midnight, then we’d go home and wind down before going to bed in the wee hours of the morning. Most often we got up between late morning and early afternoon, and that was fine by us. (Sidenote: Once Lydia was given a “learn to tell time” book as a present, one of those that has a clock-face with moveable hands — the first time she read it she arranged the hands and announced, “11 o’clock, time to wake up!”)

That pattern–minus the pesky job–continued when we moved to Sweden, at least until Lydia started school at the age of six. At that point the routine became: get up at 7:30am with Lydia, get her off to school, and go back to bed as soon as possible–and for as long as possible. Tage was a baby then, and usually he would sleep until noon-ish. On school nights Lydia had to start going to bed at 8 or 9, but everything else stayed the same up until a couple of weeks ago, when Tage started going to pre-school.

Now, the times, they are a-changin’. Tage’s school day starts at 9:00am, which means there’s no chance of me going back to bed after Lydia goes to school. It also means, obviously, that Tage’s layabout manner of sleeping ’til afternoon has got to change. It follows, then, that he can’t stay up until midnight or later, as has been his wont since his early days. Sigh.

Tonight I’m putting him to bed at 8:30, probably the earliest he’s ever gone to bed when he wasn’t sick. I anticipate resistance. Wish me luck.