Petie and I are reading “Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child”. Elise isn’t a bad sleeper necessarily, I’m guessing she’s about average. But we long for the long, uninterrupted sleep at night that we eventually got from Joelle so we’re looking for any tips we can.

I won’t review the book – as most of these books go it has a bunch of “success stories” which are kind of fluff to make the book long enough to be, well, a book. It has a few nuggets of really interesting information as well. One thing the author does is to use boxes every now and again with headings like “Practical Point”, “Major Point”, “Helpful Hint”, etc. The first night I opened the book to Chapter Six: Month Four to Twelve to get a feel for what is “average”. There is a section in this chapter about “Bedtime”, starting with a paragraph about establishing a routine before bedtime. OK, sounds reasonable…pretty common knowledge if you’ve read books like this.

Then he hits us with a “Practical Point”. I expect suggestions on what to do for a bedtime routine. Instead he states “One parent who keeps a baby up past the child’s natural time to sleep may be using this play time with the child to avoid unpleasant private time with the other parent.”

I don’t really know what to say about that.