The latest hurdle we are faced with sometimes is at bedtime. 

It starts with-”Five minutes to bedtime Danny.”  Which is answered with-”Yeah OK Dad.”  Sometimes Danny even goes as far to say “that’s fine.”  Then, when the time comes, there are sometimes tears and tantrums.

Our attempts to calm him down whilst applying logic begin brightly and positively.  “You need sleep so you can have more energy to play tomorrow.  If you’re a good boy and go to bed now, I’ll take you to the playground in the morning.”

Our smiles eventually fade though when trying to reason with him gets us nowhere and the bottom line is that we realise he’s just trying it on.

The dialogue sometimes ends with this:  “We’re going to call the sleep police.”

We’ve road tested this questionable ploy several times-on each occasion it has been successful. 

Here’s what we do.  Got a fake call utility on your phone?  You can record a voice (your own, pretending to be the local ’sleep police’ checking to see if the kids are in bed.) and when you hit a certain key your phone begins to ring.  We let our son hear the ‘cop’ on the other end asking if all the kids in the house are in bed.  If we get the timing right, any bedtime defiance by Danny usually vanishes quickly and instead he pleads: “I want to go to bed now!” 

We don’t feel great about what is essentially lying to our child but, we file it under the ‘little fib’ category to make ourselves feel better.  

At the end of a long day us parents need rest too and whilst we may have to resort to jedi mind tricks to get Danny to go to bed we know he doesn’t harbour any ill effects when he wakes up the following morning, comes into our bed and bids us good morning with a hug and a kiss each. 

In five minutes time Danny’s going to be a teenager presenting us with a whole new bunch of challenges, I’ll take whatever assistance I can get now-God bless the fake call utility!