one hour later...

i am a mostly patient person... with my children... most of the time.  but there is one thing that drives me absolutely insane, even though it's all my fault to begin with.  it is bedtime.  more specifically, a bedtime that lasts longer than 15 minutes.  
my husband is usually in charge of putting our three-year-old to bed.  that is the time of night when i try to finish up things around the house, or god-forbid, pick up a magazine or book or catch up on tivo... there's a lot i can do in any amount of kidless time!
but today, i had a few very stressful moments with her, so when 8:00 rolled around, i said, very optimistically, that i was going to put her to bed, so i could spend some good snuggle-happy-time with her!  
(on a small aside, she asks me every night to put her to bed, and sounds disappointed when i tell her that daddy is putting her to bed.  so, naturally, i thought that my announcement would make her ecstatic!  no!  on the contrary, she sounded heartbroken and asked why daddy wasn't putting her to bed- this actually made me very happy to know that there is just no pleasing her in this area.  now i can forget any guilty feelings i might feel on most given nights.  this also made my husband extremely happy, because she wanted him to put her to bed.  which, looking back, i should have just let him do...)
so, optimistically, i say i'm putting her to bed- at 8:00.  it was not until 8:45 that we actually lay down to read a book (a series of things set us back, some of which could have been controlled, but whatever.) we read our book, and i turned off the light.  (this is where the "all my fault" part comes in, because i've allowed this to go on for too many years...)  and then we wait.  each and every night, whoever is putting her to bed, turns the light off and waits.  she will not go to sleep if we are not there (yes, we could let her cry herself to sleep, i know.)  and even when we are there (as was evident tonight), she doesn't always go to sleep.  tonight, it took her one hour and five minutes to actually fall asleep.  
at first, she giggled and tried to carry on a conversation, which i quickly cut off.  then, she had to go to the bathroom (again), which she knows i can't deny.  then she needed a tissue.  then she didn't like the way her pillow was situated.  i threatened to leave what felt like three hundred times,  each time, getting more and more frustrated.  there is no reason in the world that it should take a three-year-old over an hour to fall asleep.  especially an extremely active kid who should seriously just drop from exhaustion each night when the sun goes down (like i want to.)
the only positive that i can focus on from this evening's outrageously annoying, way-too-long bedtime is that i took a few catnaps in the silences that lay between her attempts to prolong bedtime again and again and again.  and the negative, of course, was that i lost one hour of my catching up on tivo time, did not pick up a book or magazine, and will not get to tidy up the house.  because, i am now, with no hour-long delays, going to bed!