Parenting with flexibility

No offense intended at all to non-parents - but you simply have no idea how many decisions go into parenting children every day. You have no idea how often you'll second guess yourself. Change your mind. And maybe even find yourself apologizing to your kids for your mistakes. Parenting is a humbling experience!

Our latest in parenting with flexibility is some changes in the rules for Kaylee. The big girl bed is in place and our little girl seems to love it. But it only took until her first naptime in her new bed to discover her new-found freedom. Initially the rules were - when you go to bed you stay in bed. If we catch you out of your bed, you get in trouble.

Then we found her like this:
Not just once. But at almost EVERY bedtime (nap and night). Silently and stealthily (is that a word?) she creeps out of bed and at some point, falls asleep on the floor with blankie. We'd never dream of punishing a sleeping child, so we decided we'd try to catch her out of bed. The next night, she went to bed and every 5 minutes I popped my head in to see what she was up to. It only took twice before I "caught" her. And what was she doing? Getting out of bed to read books.

Now let me tell you . . . nothing thrills us more than the sight of our daughter (and hopefully one day our son) reading. They both seem to have an early love of books:
Since I had just caught her, I had to make a split second decision in my approach to finding her out of bed. I decided it was best to try to explain, once again, that she could not get out of bed when it was night night time. She crawled in, I gave her a stack of books to hopefully encourage her to stay put, and I left.

Five minutes later it had just finally become completely dark outside when I checked on her again. What happened was what resulted in a complete change to the rules. I opened the door to find her sitting up in bed, holding blankie and a book, ready for me to open the door so she could, without a word, open her book and begin to read in the light spilling in from the hallway.

I smiled at my precious girl and thanked her for staying in bed. She asked me to leave the door open (she normally wants it closed and her room completely dark). I decided it was time to let my girl make some decisions for herself and if she wants to stay up and read quietly in her room . . . so be it.

I think it was 15 minutes later when I checked on her again to see if she'd gone to sleep and she was out of bed, sitting on the floor with a new book. This time I let it go. And another while after that we found her, once again, asleep on the floor with blankie. Small price to pay for developing a love of reading.