Sweet Dreams

I want to write about the things that are working in our bedtime routine. Somehow I seemed to have hit upon the perfect quiet charming evening time with my daughters! And it was a real stroke of luck. As I posted before, my girls and I have been reading The House Above the Trees at bedtime. This is the first book EVER that has completely absorbed all three of my children (ages 5, 6, 7). They are completely still when I am reading. They don't move or speak a word. They are completely entranced. You can see them enter the world of the book or, rather, you can see the world of the book enter them. It's magical. We finish the last chapter tomorrow night and I'll be hard-pressed to find a book good enough to follow it!

After we finish our chapter and they pore over the illustrations, each girl draws a card from the box of Sweet Dreams: 36 Bedtime Wishes. I started this routine mainly because I found the box of wish cards when I was unpacking and wanted us to get more use out of them. But my daughters LOVE their wish cards. Each girl goes quietly off to her room to wait to be tucked in and looks at her illustration and reads the back. Then when I come in to tuck them in, we have a little quiet conversation. Always before they would bounce on their beds or sing loudly while waiting for me, but the wish card seems to change all that. It inspires a very peaceful reflective mood and I've had some very sweet moments with them. Listening to my 6 year old daughter reading John Keats was so dear. And the cards help give me some things to mull over at night when I'm finishing up my day, too. Especially if I am stressed out... I find they give much-needed perspective, like this quote from Mother Teresa:


It is not how much we do, but how much love we put into doing.






By the way, while creating this post, I discovered that Chinaberry has made an exclusive audio recording of this book. If you are looking for Ethel Cook Eliot on CD, here it is!