1) to create a homemade LOL doll (utterly terrifying)
2) to cross stitch a coaster. I know.
3) to perform last year’s class assembly. Solo.
4) to read birthday cards (from January. Who knew they’d escaped the recycling bin?)
5) to perform an elaborate – and lengthy – body percussion arrangement.
6) to tidy the playroom – I knew things were getting desperate at this point
Earlier, I rediscovered the above list in which I had compiled the reasons presented in one single evening to delay bedtime on a hot, summer night. Let me tell you that the colder weather hasn’t hampered the creativity of the little badgers in their attempts to stay up later.
Like many, I suspect, I’ve always found that bedtime holds the possibility to be both the best and most trying part of the day. With the benefit of nostalgic, rose-tinted glasses, I remember vividly lovely evenings of snuggling fragrant, sleepy toddlers as we read ‘The Tiger Who Came To Tea’, for the 300th time, and forget about the evenings where the Supernanny advice was put through its paces and found wanting. (Or I was. Something definitely wasn’t up to the job. One memorably long evening I put the largest little badger back in her little cot bed 143 times.)
Hopefully, with the benefit of hindsight I will look back on our current stage and remember only the stories shared and not the frustration of finding a child who but moments before was pyjama-clad now in a party dress, complete with generously applied lipgloss, or the endless tasks of cat-husbandry that suddenly gain an urgent, imperative necessity as night falls.
We are reading ‘I, Cosmo’ by Carlie Sorosiak at the moment and it’s proving to be a real crowdpleaser that’s helping smooth bedtimes. The little badgers are so keen to find out what will happen that the pre-bed faffing has moderately diminished.
Cosmo, a golden retriever, is the narrator of the story, about a family going through difficult times. He’s a lovable protagonist and the rest of the characters are believable and appealing. The storyline moves at quite a gentle pace – I imagine if a criticism were to be levied at it, this would be it – but I rather like that, at bedtime.
We have just read ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ by John Boyne – an incredible book, but as harrowing as you’d expect from a novel based in Auschwitz – so this less eventful storyline, with its lovely observations is particularly welcome.
We haven’t finished the story yet though, and Cosmo’s advanced years are causing me great angst. Keep your fingers crossed – we’re still fragile.
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raising badgers 