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For Michael's Benefit

An update especially for Michael, who was not home for bedtime tonight:

Luke crawled up one stair today! I'm not sure that he didn't have help, though, Amanda was sitting right next to him and I didn't actually see the crawling. We'd better get the gate back up soon.

Amanda and Eleanor got to bed _almost_ on time, but not quite. I put Luke down for bed while the kids watched "Rocket Soup". I finished with Luke as the movie was finishing, Amanda hopped right up and ran into her bedroom. But then as I was singing to her, Amanda started scratching the eczema on her feet just as she was going to bed, so we had to go back down for hydroxyz (which I had forgotten earlier). She was in bed, insisting that I needed to sing the song about the sling (David and Goliath) by about 7:25, not bad. (I didn't sing any more songs, in case you are wondering.)

Then I went back into Eleanor, who wanted to watch "just a little more" of the video. We turned it off at 7:40, and then she wanted to have a short story instead of songs. I told her that she had to brush her teeth first, which started the complaining. She did stop when I pointed out that complaining takes up a lot of time, which should be spent reading stories... We read _The 500 Hats of Bartholemew Cubbins_ on of Dr. Seuss' great non-rhyming books. When we finished (8:10) she looked at the clock and said "It's past my bedtime!" and got into bed with only a little more complaining, about a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10...

Now we just need to see if I can get into bed before it gets very late, wish me luck!
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