Wednesday 25 January 2012

Winding Down at Bedtime: Three calming games

Some nights a snack, a bedtime story, a snuggle and chat, and lights out while the music quietly plays is enough for the boy to fall asleep. Other nights, however, he needs something more to help him sleep. During our nightly chat, we talk about our days - the highs and lows, our hopes and plans for the next day - and I often end our talk with a calming game to help him wind down and fall asleep. Whether I stay and play with him or just leave him to it himself, these games are great ways to relax the body and soothe the mind while waiting for sleep to come.

Goodnight Toes

A fun twist on the traditional counting sheep game, "Goodnight Toes" involves saying goodnight to each of their body parts, starting at their toes and going all the way up to their nose. "Close your eyes. Now say goodnight to each of your body parts, and relax it as you say goodnight to it. Ready? Goodnight toes...goodnight feet...goodnight ankles....."

Because he's a four year old boy and because I just can't resist the inevitable gale of laughter that follows, we're always sure to say goodnight to our poop as well. And our pee, and our blood, and our bones, and all of our organs. This might not be terribly Grandma-friendly, but it's a great nightly review of anatomy once the poop-induced giggle fest abates!

Goodnight Grandma

Similar to "Goodnight Toes", this games replaces body parts with people we love. "Lie in bed, close your eyes, and say goodnight to everyone you love," I instruct. Blessed with fairly large extended families and many dear friends, his list can get quite long. I often don't hear another word from him once I've left him to say goodnight to everyone he loves.

What Did We Do Tomorrow?

Not the grammatical error you might think it is, "What Did We Do Tomorrow?" is a game the boy came up with himself, and it is one of our favourites. It usually begins with a more grammatically-correct review of "what did we do yesterday?" and "what did we do today?", where we simply talk together about how the day(s) went and the various activities we did. The boy then flashes me his impish grin and asks me, "what did we do tomorrow?"

Well! Just let me tell you what we did tomorrow! Why, we went to the moon, we did! We had a picnic right there, but it was so windy that dust got all over our food and it wasn't as tasty as we'd hoped. So we flew back home, rinsed our mouths out with water, and had a picnic in our living room instead. And then those two sweet boys of mine? Why they put themselves to bed! Early, at that! It was fantastic. Mommy stayed up for a while and ate chocolate pudding (and saved some for the boys to eat in the morning, of course) and then went to bed early and had a wonderful looooong uninterrupted sleep. And that, my friends, is what we did tomorrow.

Our stories cover everything from the mundane to the fantastical. Sometimes (as with the early bedtime and chocolate pudding above) they're a mother's fantasies; other times, they're a child's dream come true; still other stories are so dull and boring that they come around the circle and become hilarious. After I've told a few, the boy tells me his stories, also ranging from the common to the exotic. Not only is this storytelling a nice way of winding down, but it's a great way to bond and to hear his perspective on things.


What have you found helps your child to relax at bedtime? Any tips, techniques, or games to share?

13 comments:

  1. just good old singing in our house, but these tips are great! thanks for sharing! very inspiring!

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    1. I used to sing to him when he was a toddler to put him to sleep, but I haven't done that in a while. I bet he'd love it! Thanks for sharing.

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  2. Reading together before the bedtime routine even starts. Instead of going from PLAYING AND GOING CRAZY AND GENERALLY BRINGING THE HOUSE DOWN to "Oh hey, time to potty," which regularly results in arguments and dawdling, we spend 15 minutes beforehand reading a book together -- both of us reading, him reading the words he knows and me reading the rest. I'm irregular with this due to crazy evening schedules, but when I'm more consistent, it definitely cuts down on the bedtime arguments and gets him a little more chill before it's time to sleep.

    (Once he's IN bed, I read him another book [of his choice] and sing him a song [of his choice], then snuggle a few minutes. Sometimes he'll ask for two books instead of a song, and hey, I'm cool with that.)

    I like your game of making up fantastic adventures for tomorrow! Raiden can be so literal, though, that I can see him getting angry if he doesn't have any chocolate pudding in the morning, lol. Good for imagination-building, though... maybe I could do something like that with yesterday instead of tomorrow so he wouldn't see it as a promise. Hmm.

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    1. Reading together before the bedtime routine starts is brilliant!! That would definitely help us better ease the transition between crazy-loud-wild-play and the beginning of the bedtime routine. Our bedtime routine starts with tidying up toys, and there is definitely often reluctance to stop playing and start putting things away, even with plenty of warning. What a great idea; thanks!

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  3. Love the 'what did we do tomorrow' such a great bridge from the real to the imagined. Lovely, dreamy...
    Gauri

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  4. we play "where are we sleeping". Where they try to come up with the most imaginative places they could pretend to sleep. Sometimes it gets really funny and other times so relaxing you dont even want to get up after the kids are asleep <3

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    1. What a fun idea! We do something similar during the day sometimes ("where are we sailing to?") but I never thought to do it as a nighttime winding down activity. Thanks for sharing!

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    2. I like that too...where are we sleeping

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  5. Great ideas here, thanks for the inspiration :)

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  6. With my little girl (5) and boy (3) we play the dream shop game at bedtime. I give them both some dream pennies (pretend) placing each one in their hand as we count and then we talk about what they will spend it on in the dream shop. The dream shop is the place they go to when they're asleep and they usually end up buying things for us to do in our dream together. Such as buying pink cats to take for a walk in the park, buckets and spade for a day at the beach, magical ponies for a trip up in the clouds etc. The idea is that the kids go to sleep before me so that they can go to the dream shop and buy all the items we need and then we pick a place to meet to spend our dreams together.
    Sounds sickly sweet but the kids love it and we always have some lovely chats before bed!
    Lorraine xx

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  7. Love these games and will have to try them with my 3 year old. We usually talk about all the fun things we did that day. It helps calm him. I recently saw a neat activity on pinterest (obviously) where having a journal in their bedroom that they can draw in before bed (until they are old enough to write). I thought this was a great idea.

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  8. Oh my gosh I loooovvvveeee your goodnight toes, and goodnight legs and goodnight poop, etc., etc., game! That's happening here tonight for sure! Mostly these days I lay down for snuggling with the three of them and tell them Fables with morals (mostly my snazzed-up and slightly modernized versions of Aesop's Fables) which they absolutely love and cannot get enough of. I used to just tell them the ones I already knew from my dad telling me them growing up, but my little ones are quite demanding when it comes to these folk-tales, so I've had to add many more to my repertoire!!

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  9. I nurse and cuddle my toddler to sleep at the moment... my dad used talk me through a version of Goodnight Toes, where I could move and flex each body piece and muscle one last time before it went to sleep... I really loved falling asleep that way...

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