Bedtime games

Our youngest, an 8th-grader, goes to bed at 9:30. No, wait, let me rephrase that. He's supposed to go to bed at 9:30 but invariably, he delays past that. He's very creative with his excuses, too.

It made his older brother (a 10th grader) mad. He thought we weren't enforcing bedtime "curfew" like we did with him. So he began a bedtime log. He wrote down how many minutes past bedtime that his younger sibling was up. He's been doing this for months and it's become a hilarious game. He reminds his brother just how many minutes - hours now - his sibling "owes" him (a tally of all the minutes of overtime). Older son thinks that younger son ought to go to bed hours earlier one day to make it all balance out. You can imagine that younger son isn't so keen on that idea.

Last night I went up to remind younger son to go to bed, about 5 minutes past time. Older son yelped, "Victory!" for reasons that escaped me, of course, but I couldn't help but laugh. As did hubby and younger son, who tried to protest but couldn't get the words out between gasps of laughter.

I'm going to miss this game next year when we institute new bedtime rules for younger son. As a high schooler, we will give him the responsibility of setting his own bedtime. We know it will get abused initially (older son sure overdid it at first) but our hope is that he will learn to judge just how late he can stay up and still function the next day. Or so I hope and so hubby tells me (it was his idea and I grudgingly went along but it seems to have worked - that's one for you, hubby ;-) ).