My favorite time of the day

My favorite time of the day is when the girls and I have story time right before bedtime. They each pick a story and then we read the 3 stories. We usually sit in our special reading area. (It use to be a closet, but the renters we had in here broke the door, so we converted it into our special reading area.) The 2 older girls sit on either side of me, and then Lucy sits in my lap.

For me, this is a sacred time. It is the time where we can go anywhere or be anyone. I love looking at the girls faces as I read and make different voices for different characters. I love seeing their imaginations run wild as they try to put themselves in those "mystical" places. I love leaning forward and smelling Lucy's hair and then she will typically raise her cute little head up and I will kiss her forehead and then her eyes will light up as she gives a beaming smile. This time is sacred because I know that in a blink of an eye they will all be grown up and being all sorts of independent on their own.

It has taken me a few years to figure out the whole night time routine . In the beginning there was the first child. Let's just say I was a freak when it came to sleep and the child. I had her on a very rigid schedule. Nap time was not to be messed with, and if it was, you had to deal with me. It was not pretty.

With the second child, I was still rigid in the schedule, but was not as much of a freak. For the third child, I had learned that it is not the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it if a child does not get a nap or does not get to bed at precisely 7 o'clock p.m. I became a new person. I believe I started becoming someone that people wanted to actually hang around again. It only took me till the third child to figure this out, but it is better late than never.

I look forward when Kady can be a more active participant in our nighttime ritual. Now, she literally begs to go to bed no later than 6:30 p.m. Frankly, that is too early to gather the chicks around to start doing our story time. She will be ready by the end of spring, when she will get transplanted in the "big girl" room with her sisters before the new baby arrives.

When I was a child, my fondest memory of bedtime is my Father sitting outside of our bedroom in the hallway with his guitar and he would sing to us. He would sing songs he had made up or some of my favorites were Love Potion #9, Rainbow Connection, It only takes a spark.... His voice was so soothing to me. Those songs took me to "mystical" places. In a way it was his way of reading to us but in a different form.

"The most beautiful and the most profound emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical." --Albert Einstein

What kind of rituals do you do with your children, or if you may not have any, what kind of good memories do you have of when you were a child?