Early to Bed

I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time.  What parent doesn’t?

Tonight, for the first time, the boys and I went out to drink beer, sing drinking songs, and eat peanuts at the local pub. So what if it was root beer, and the songs were from the 18th century, and the pub was a tourist attraction at Colonial Williamsburg.  We came home at 10:30, which means we were having fun, right?

If you are a bit zealous about making your kids go to bed early, you only see 10:30 with them once a year, on New Year’s Eve.  When Zach was a baby, I read all of the books on how important sleep is.  And I heard at a lecture last year that, on average, children who sleep 30 minutes less than their peers, lose half a letter grade in school.  And it just gets worse the less sleep they get.  But I didn’t need any studies to convince me to put my kids to bed early.  I just needed kids.

Turns out that if you wait until your late-thirties to have kids, and if those kids happen to be the exhausting variety of kid, then you are wiped out by 6 pm.  It’s only out of the goodness of my heart that my kids are allowed to stay up until 7.  They could hardly believe their good fortune when I told them that if they took a nap, we could go out again at 8:30.

In case you are planning a trip to Williamsburg with kids, I highly recommend this activity.  We went to Chowning’s Tavern, where we learned the drinking song whose tune eventually became the Star Spangled Banner (much to the dismay of the temperance ladies).  We also learned how to play a dice game called Buck.  (Click here for a description of many colonial games.)

Clearly, the Pilgrims we visited last week would not have approved of the loose lifestyle we’ve been living in Williamsburg.  Beer and dice games were not their cup of tea.  And they certainly wouldn’t be up cavorting late into the night.

Which suits me just fine.  Even though I had a great time tonight, I’m happy to wait another decade or so to share a pint with my sons.  I’m just too tired to keep this up.