bedtime strategy

The cute picture shows Dennis bringing flowers to the patient. He carried them all the way through the hospital, stopping passers-by to tell them "look, I'm taking flowers to Uncle Denny!". He got a lot of smiles. He marched right into Uncle Denny's room and announced "look, Uncle Denny, I brought flowers--these are for you!", and then he proceeded to do the random kinds of mischief he does whenever we visit Uncle Denny's hospital room.

I tried a new strategy at bedtime tonight. He wore his 'new' robot pajamas from Caedmon, which absolutely delighted him, and we had to 'talk robot' from the time I put them on. He spoke to me in 'robot' saying "now. we. have. to. be. robots" in a monotone. So we walked around with jerky movements and talking funny for a while and soon it was bedtime. I told him all good robots needed to recharge their batteries, and as I put him in the bed, I said (in my best robot-mommy voice) "here. is. your. charging. station." He liked this very much, and after promising to stay in bed if I'd read a story to him, we read 'Where the Wild Things Are' (his favorite). We practiced roaring our terrible roars and rolling our terrible eyes and gnashing our terrible teeth and showing our terrible claws, and then Dennis told me "BE STILL" and I called him the king of the Wild Things. Then we prayed together and he went to sleep. Gosh I'm going to miss the bedtime rituals when he grows up.