Please Go to Sleep so I Can Eat the Halloween Candy

I have a love-hate relationship with bedtime.  It's great in that, you know, the kids are going to bed, obviously.  But there are other things I love about bedtime.  I love snuggling in to read a book.  I love the clean smell of baby shampoo.  And oh, how I love pajamas.  Especially the footy ones.  Those make me giddy with happiness.  Footy pajamas seem to have been designed to not just keep little feet warm, but to make moms melt.  Unless they're on this guy:

Then, no so much.  But on toddlers?  Makes you forget all about that day's tantrums, the drawing on the walls, and the throwing of spaghetti.

Before you go thinking we're past the days of footy pajamas here, the truth is that the girls love them.  They have them in big-kid sizes, but it's still kind of hot here for fleece footy pajamas, alas.  

So, yes, there are things about bedtime that are fabulous.

However.

There are things about it that make me cringe as the clock ticks closer to 7:00.  I start to get twitchy and nervous, like I'm on a bomb disposal team.   Little Dude must follow a very specific routine in order to be able to go to sleep.  The routine cannot be deviated from in any way, or there will be a breakdown.

Tonight he fooled around, trying to avoid getting into pajamas, running away into another room, trying to get us to play chase.  The Absent-Minded Professor and I didn't play the game, but Little Dude still burned through all of his reading time with this.  He was warned that he wouldn't get to read if he kept fooling around, and he kept fooling around.

He did not get to read the I-Spy book.

This is a really tough judgment call for me.  I know that looking at a couple pages of I-Spy only takes 10 minutes.  And the tantrum that will result if I take away the book for the evening, will be a minimum of 30 minutes.

Which is more important?  Keeping the peace in the house when we're trying to get four kids to sleep?  Or teaching him that you have to cooperate if you want to have time to read I-Spy?

I went with teaching the lesson.  Routines are a huge part of who Little Dude is, but he also has to learn, however gradually, that cooperation is what makes this family tick.  

The change in routine caused some, er, "behavior issues."  It was like watching Dr. House go through that first night without the Vicodin, except without the clever banter and Dr. Cuddy's cleavage.  There should be a methadone clinic for this.

Lately, Little's been pretty freaked out about Halloween, so he's been having some "behavior issues."  And by "behavior issues," I mean spazzy freak-outs where he becomes completely unintelligible and cries so hard that he gags and I have no idea what the immediate trigger even was.  I mean the kind of thing where I find myself scratching my head and wondering, "is this what a seizure looks like?"  A quarter of kids on the spectrum have seizures, so it's something that's always in the back of my mind.

But no, these are simply temper tantrums.  Like many children with Asperger Syndrome, Little Dude is sometimes very immature emotionally.  When he is frustrated, or frightened, or simply overloaded, he responds the way a two-year-old would instead of the way a four-year-old would.  It's not his fault; it's just the way he is.  Accepting that doesn't make it any less frustrating when it's the end of the day and I'm tired.

On the upside, as soon as he was asleep, I raided the Halloween candy.  So much for the Almond Joys.