Night time routine

Every night before bed, the 3 of us sit down on the couch and we read 3 books together. Not sure how 3 became the lucky number, but it is what it is. We tell Maggie to go and pick out 3 books and bring them to us...and most of the time, we end up reading the same 3 books for about a week. We KNOW these books by heart by now -- we don't even need to have the books to tell the stories. So, every now and then we'll say, "get 3 books but DO NOT bring Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" and you'll hear a little sigh. It's really quite funny. I mean, we seriously have over 100 books to pick from. I think I will rotate some books tomorrow!

After we read the books, we will pray together. Either Daddy or I will pray and Maggie will repeat what we say. We have a tendency to say the same things - mainly to help her in learning to pray. What's funny is when we change it up a bit and she "corrects" us.

She then gives lots of hugs and kisses, grabs her ba-ba and heads to her room. We get her bed ready, put on her sleep mask (which, thankfully, she has no issues with whatsoever!) and I sit on the side of the bed to rock her. When I rock her, she wants me to sing to her. When we first started doing this a long time ago, I would just randomly pick songs to sing to her. I never did them in a particular order or made sure I sang something every time. However, over time, we fell into a routine of what songs would be sung and in which order. Actually, Maggie pretty much dictated that.

I remember the first night that I realized this was happening. We sat down, I started to rock Maggie and I started to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. She said, "no Momma. wrong song. Itsy Bitsy Spider". That's when I knew that the play list had been made :) So, every night, as I rock my sweet girl to sleep, this is what you would hear:

1. Itsy Bitsy Spider
2. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star
3. You are My Sunshine
4. This Little Light of Mine
5. Jesus Loves Me
6. ABCs
7. I'm a Little Owl (sung to the tune of I'm a Little Teapot)
8. Goodnight Sweetheart
9. The Lord's Prayer

Quite a collection, huh?! I can't complain -- at least she lets me sing and rock to her. There will come a day, and hopefully not too soon, when she won't want Momma to rock or sing to her...and I'll be wishing for a routine of playlists to sing over and over and over again.