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Hi everyone, Melissa here at CloudMom talking today about sleep. Very important issue for
all of us and a key one for me because I do have a couple of kids in each bedroom, and
when we're away from home such as we are right now in Florida, I usually have five kids in
one room. So getting them to sleep is really challenging and there's basically two things
that I've started to do. The number one thing I do, I call it a staggering system and it
works like dominoes. I put the children down in the bedroom one by one and I wait until
each one is asleep before I put in the next child, and I start very early. So the first
child down is the one whose the youngest who hasn't napped. So that's my three-year-old,
Annaliese. She goes down at 6:30. She's just stopping to nap, so she's exhausted by that
point. She's been at all day camp. The next one is my five-year-old boy. He gets a little
book and a song outside of the room and once he enters the sanctuary, it's like "Shh".
He goes down into bed, then my two older boys, one by one, they alternate nights and I have
to be very clear about this, otherwise it's a battle every night, so they switch off nights
in terms of who goes down first. And then finally, when everybody's asleep at around
7:30 in goes Senorita la baby. Okay. And she's usually really tired by that point, so she
goes down to sleep. If she starts to fuss and make noise, I pull her out. I sort of
soothe her a bit and then I put her back down. So this is something that works for me most
of the time. The other thing I do, and I started to do lately because I've tried to get more
flexible, is that if it's an important night and we're having a barbecue with another family,
or their cousins are over, it's a summer evening, I just let them stay up, not crazy late but
like 9 o'clock. And then I just put everybody to bed at once and they're usually so tired
that they just collapse onto their beds. They get up the next day a little bit tired. But
it's usually fine. I don't do this every night, if we have a night like that, then the next
night I try to go back to my little staggering system, so that they don't get overtired.
So anyway, this is what I have been doing, but I want to hear what you've been doing.
So please comment on this video on CloudMom.com or tweet me on Twitter, and let me know what
you do when it comes to getting your kids to go to sleep. So thanks so much for joining
and see you next time.