Bedtime

While we tend to be a bit more relaxed about Julia's bedtime in the summer, her recent trend of staying up until 9:30 or 10 is really starting to get old. There are those nights, few and far between, when she is out like a light within five minutes of us leaving her room. But more commonly, she is up and out of bed several times each night, with some sort of half-hearted excuse. It usually always begins with her coming to find us, either in our bedroom as we're watching tv, or in the kitchen as we're cleaning up after dinner. Here's a general synopsis of how the conversation usually goes:

JULIA: (clomping up the stairs to our bedroom)
ME: What is it, Julia?
JULIA: (opening the bedroom door and coming in.) Mommy? I have to go pee.
ME: Okay, then go.

(I must interject the fact that to get to our bedroom, Julia has to come out of her room, go down the stairwell into the kitchen, walk past the bathroom into the hallway, and go up the hallway stairs to our bedroom in order to avoid walking straight through Madeleine's bedroom, which is in between her room and ours. So, again, she walks PAST the bathroom to come tell us she needs to pee.)

After I give her the okay to use the potty, she clomps downstairs, and then clomps back up anywhere between 2 and 15 minutes later to explain to me some problem she discovered downstairs that is preventing her from being able to just go back to her bedroom. The reasons have been getting more and more ridiculous. Here is a smattering of excuses she has given us over the past few weeks:

-"Mommy? But I didn't clean up my toys before bed."

-"Mommy? But I need to put all my manger people back in the freezer to sleep." (yes, her manger people sleep in the freezer of her play kitchen.)
-"Mommy? You didn't put the top on my space puzzle after you put Madeleine to bed."

-"Mommy? Um, there's still water and a fish in a cup in the bath."
-"Mommy? But I only have one tissue left in my room." (Then when Ethan tried to give her a tissue, she responded, "No, I don't have a stuffy nose.")

So, I think it's time to start cracking down a bit more and having consequences for getting out of bed for any reason other than a genuine need to use the potty. And hopefully before too long she will stop coming down out of her room, and then we can have, as she would say, NO consequences today!