Why does the time between 6-9 p.m. take 50 trillion hours?
Every night, my husband and I lay like zombies, trying to watch t.v. or just visit for the first time all day, and the kids act like lunatics. Bouncing off the walls. Fight after fight after fight. I barely get dinner cleaned up and they want to know what's for dessert.
I try to reserve movie/cartoon watching until evenings on the off chance it will slow them down. But I no sooner put a movie in and they're back up running around.
I am racking my brain of solutions of how to make our evenings more enjoyable. Less yelling (me), less running (them), less crying (everyone). I want bedtime (the actual tucking in, the kisses, etc.) to be more enjoyable and less hurried. By the time they are all in bed, I am so exhausted I have no energy to pick up the disaster they have left in their wake, much less "entertain" my husband like he needs and deserves. Like we BOTH need and deserve.
I know the solution lies in ME. They need more of ME. I try and tell myself that someday, way too soon, they will be out of the house and my husband and I will have more time to ourselves than we know what to do with.
Hard to imagine though.
Jackie: I don't know if this will help, but I used to have the same problem. After dinner I just let the dishes go. I always do them the next morning if I can. I start bedtime one hour or more before the actual bedtime. 1.I give snacks, 2.pjs 3. brush teeth, potty
ReplyDelete4. sing and pray with Mom 5.Lights out (all my kids go to bed at 8:00, no exceptions)--getting out of bed for petty things gets discipline and loss of privileges if it continues more than once. Sometimes, I will do the dishes and some laundry quick and sit down with Roy. But most of the time, I sit down and we have an hour of just talk time between us and then we each do something relaxing. Sometimes we go to bed at the same time, sometimes not. It depends. This has really helped me so I am not so tired. It's hard to stick to it, but it works. One thing that helped me in the beginning was to write a time down for each activity before bed (snack, pjs, etc) and then have a certain amount of minutes for each.