Today's the Day and Some Thoughts on Sleeping

This is it. No more swimming. Today is all about getting ready for school. After breakfast, I am cleaning up the school room once and for all and taking pictures. I'll share them soon. THEN, with my ultra organized area around me, finishing up the planning will be easy, right? Well, it will be prettier, that's for sure.

Our old school room ready to go one year. So pretty!

Then, after lunch, I am going to Carrie's house and we are going to plan. She has good ideas and also is farther along in her planning so I'm going to go suck her ideas. Why should I have to do all the work? No, what works for one family won't work for all families...but I want to get some good ideas and have someone to bounce ideas off of.

Since we are kind of busy Friday and are going to dinner on Saturday....I really need today to PRODUCTIVE. VERY.

Now. I want to talk about sleeping. I have several teen friends on Facebook and I am just amazed that in the summer they have turned into bats. They are nocturnal, I'm telling you. I asked sweetheart's friend yesterday what time she had gone to bed the night before (her teen sisters are on FB so I had a good idea). She told me: 2am. THEN, of course, they sleep all day the next day. And eat breakfast at 4:00 in the afternoon. She's only 10 so I suppose she went to bed "early." Her sisters stay up all night. Like every night is a lock-in.

Little Bit and Sweetheart ready for bed at a hotel last Spring Break.

They are not the only ones. I have a lot of friends whose kids sleep until 10 or noon in the summer. Ug. Can I just say that I HATED the day after lock-ins when I was in high school? That is the grossest feeling. I hated how I felt after sleepovers too. The last (and one of the only) sleepovers that Sweetheart ever went to was when she was 7. It was a birthday party and I naively assumed the mom would call "bedtime" at some point. I figured it would be late but....oh dear. At 1:00am we got a call from Sweetheart/the mom. Something was hurting. Do you want me to come get you? No. Put a cold rag on it. Are you sure you want to stay? Yes. From what we can tell, we guess it was like 3:30am before she fell asleep. And needless to say, church was the next day. Those girls (15 or so of them) dragged into church and the mom fed them donuts before church started. Half of them fell asleep in church, Sweetheart (of course) got a big headache but I refused to let her sleep all day. We just let her have a nap and then be miserable. We put her to bed early, but I wanted her to remember the miserable feeling so she would better understand why she was NEVER doing it again. She told me, through tears, "But Mommy, nobody put me to bed!" It was sad, I'm telling ya.

My kids have been sleeping until 8 or 8:30 these last 2 weeks. Most of the summer Sweetheart was up at 7. Little Bit usually gets up by 8 and that is when they have both gone to bed at 9. Anyway, I mentioned something about how my kids have been sleeping too late and then I said 8:30 and several people looked shocked at me. But at church last night several parents agreed with me--8:30 was too late and their kids had been sleeping that late too.

So what do you think? Do your kids bounce out of bed at sunrise no matter what or do you all turn into bats in the summer or somewhere in the middle?