68. Bedtime With Charlie

Parenting can involve a lot of worrying about all the ways we’re unknowingly setting our kids up for future therapy. But for now, there’s stories at bedtime.

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INTRO MUSIC 

VOICEMAIL BEEP

Okay Caller: Hi, my name’s Kendra. I’m from Ohio and I’ve been really enjoying, it’s gonna be okay, and I thought it might be fun for me to share something about my day that reminds me it’s gonna be okay. So I have a four year old named Charlie, and like most parents, there’s good parts of my day and less great parts of my day.

And my four year old is both very sweet and fun and can be opinionated and assertive. I think those are the words you’re supposed to use. For example, he told me yesterday that my face looks mad when I’m happy. I’m not sure what to think about that one. Pretty much every day. It’s a fight to get his hands washed before dinner.

Doesn’t really eat vegetables, all the hard things that parents have to deal with after working all day, which can be for me very challenging and makes me feel just yucky generally. But there is one thing we do every day that’s sweet. The whole bedtime routine. We read three books and then tell two stories.

And what these stories look like is me and my husband climb into bed and Charlie will give us a prompt. And these prompts have to do with whatever he’s into at the time. So it could be dinosaurs or Spider-Man. Right now it’s Mario. He’s into Mario. We like the Mario movie. And so the prompt will go something like, Bower is being bad and he is trying to capture Princess Peach or it’s Luigi’s birthday and we wanna throw him a party, something like that.

And then it’s me and my husband’s job to make up a story, so he will start it and I’ll end it or vice versa. We have half and half in the stories. There’s lots of interruptions from my son about how we didn’t. Do the story right or how he thinks it should go a different way, et cetera. Sometimes we have to remind him that it’s our story, not his story.

But overall, I think this is a really sweet time. I’ve been reflecting on it how, throughout the day, parents always worry me included about all the things, if your kid is gonna be in therapy someday. Cause of something you said, you did, which they probably are. If they’re getting enough vegetables, which they aren’t. Screen time.

But I think it’s really nice to know that I think this is one thing we’re doing right, that we’re taking this time at the end of the day to connect with our kid. That’s very sweet and I hope he remembers it and I remember it. About our bedtime stories. So you know, when we lay in bed and tell those bedtime stories about how Mario got a perfect mushroom birthday cake for Princess Peach, just reminds you that it’s probably gonna be okay.

Nora McInerny: It is probably going to be okay and you are probably doing a decent job at parenting, especially if you are making up bespoke stories at bedtime. And as a person who, for most of our childhoods, subsisted on mostly potatoes, can we just agree that vegetables are overrated?

OUTRO MUSIC

I like ’em now, but I don’t blame a kid for not wanting a bunch of wet plants for dinner, you know it’s going to be okay. Um, it is, and that it is different every day and we love hearing yours and sharing yours. You can send us a voice memo like Kendra did to I igt feelings and.co. You can tap out an email that we’ll read.

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CREDITS