Just to clear the air before I start, I’ll put this failure wholly where it belongs, and that’s on me.

Vacations always throw the Monster off.  Anything that’s not highly structured, anything that involves having loose structure, these things all tend to make things difficult around our house in terms of trying to keep him moving forward.  And… well, nothing’s been going on since Thursday, due to the holiday weekend.  So what happened on Saturday was a predictable disaster.

We have a script for bedtime – the Monster gets his melatonin gummies, says goodnight to everyone, and goes upstairs.  We get him changed into his pajamas, brush teeth, have lullabies and he goes to bed.

Of late, we’ve been letting R and the Monster get up early and go downstairs, as I discussed previously.  This has saved our sanity quite a bit on vacation mornings, when we can get get some extra rest in bed without feeling like we need to be rushing downstairs immediately.  And because we had no where to be on Saturday, none of the three of us (Monster, R and myself) got out of our pajamas.  The wife headed out to run some errands, and I kept the peace at home with both boys.

And it was a good day all in all – the kids played nicely next to each other, if not with each other, and we goofed around physically for a bit…

What got lost through the day was my keeping track of the Monster’s toileting, and that we’d forgotten in the morning to swap him into cloth underwear.  At some point, he’d had an accident, and had to be changed… and since it was 5:30, and we weren’t going anywhere, I elected to change him into another pair of pajamas…

… which triggered his scripting.  Changing into pajamas means bedtime, and so he immediately jumped to that part of his programming.  Worse, I had left him to do it himself, so when he’d not come down in five minutes, I went back upstairs to find that his door was closed.  When I opened the door, he sharply rebuked me with “Good night!”

Uh-oh.

He’d not had dinner, he’d not had melatonin… and he had put himself to bed, since he decided that it was dark and he had changed into his jammies, so it had to be bedtime.  I had visions of him getting up at 2 or 3 AM, screaming, and my not getting much sleep.

Thankfully, my wife managed to go up an hour later and convinced him to come downstairs for some dinner.  But there are times that, no matter how much we love the scripts, they go massively, massively awry…