What Happens One Hour Before Putting Kids To Bed

What Happens One Hour Before Putting Kids To Bed

Last night was a doozie.

The kind of night where my husband and I came downstairs and just looked at each other with wide eyes and then grinned, as if shocked that we’d somehow made it through the Apocalypse (otherwise known as bedtime), alive.

So I sat down on the couch, not sure if 1. I wanted to eat chocolate-chip zucchini bread (the only chocolate left in the house), 2. watch Netflix, or 3. write to process my angst, thinking that surely we’re not the only parents in the world who experience a level of madness unparalleled in parenting history, night after night, for the last sixty minutes before bedtime.

And, thus, my parody on “What Happens One Hour After Drinking a Can of Coke” was born:

What Happens One Hour Before Putting Kids To Bed

Fifty Minutes Before Bedtime:

10 quarts of adrenaline pump into your bloodstream as you take in the dirty floor, dirty dishes, and dirty children that all need to be respectively swept and/or washed and/or dried before bed.

You don’t immediately vomit from this overwhelming task because you know that if you can get through the next fifty minutes, you will be able to come downstairs to a quiet house and sit on the couch work out while watching whatever brain-fluff is being offered by Netflix.

Forty Minutes Before Bedtime:

Your blood sugar dips as you clean as fast as your body (and/or baby strapped to your back and/or toddler strapped to your ankles) will allow. You weren’t able to consume enough calories during supper because all your children wanted whatever tiny morsel you managed to sneak on your plate (except for green beans; they let you have those).

You combat this sugar dip by scrounging into a Tupperware container of emergency brownies you stash in the freezer, telling your three-year-old (who catches you, brownie-in-hand) she will break her teeth if she eats one.

(Marathon running and/or Paleo diet and/or DIY body wraps start tomorrow.)

Thirty Minutes Before Bedtime:

Spazz mode is complete. Your pupils dilate, blood pressure rises, in response your children run through the dirt pile you swept in the kitchen, screaming like banshees, because they get a great kick (pun!) out of seeing you mad. The calming receptors in your brain are now blocked, causing your voice to shatter glass grow shrill.

Twenty Minutes Before Bedtime:

Your body ups your dopamine level, effectively stimulating the this-is-your-spawn mode in your brain, because otherwise you might send the whole troupe packing with little sticks and checked handkerchiefs, carrying all their worldly goods, à la Huckleberry Finn.

This is how coffee works in the morning, by the way.

Ten Minutes Before Bedtime:

The sugar in the brownies binds with the organic, free-range chicken nugget you had for supper, providing a further boost in metabolism that helps you have the energy to scrub your children down with the efficiency of a pit crew.

Five Minutes Before Bedtime:

A heady mix of post-clean euphoria and I-love-my-spawn dopamine crashes together, meaning that—rather than just dumping your kids in their respective beds and slamming the door—you find yourself slowing down and breathing, brushing damp hair back from shining foreheads and reading another book . . . or two.

One Minute After Bedtime:

As the hormonal, maternal rave inside you dies down, you’ll start to have an exhaustion crash. You may become irritable and/or sluggish and/or catatonic. You’ve also now, literally, used up every ounce of strength you had left on getting your children in bed, which you were planning on using to write a screenplay and/or paint the guest room with teal and gray stripes (curse you, Pinterest!).

But, as you collapse on the couch (and then pull from beneath your backside a yard sale’s worth of stuffed animals), you realize that one day you can sit in your spotless house, watch all the Gilmore Girls reruns until your heart’s content, while your children are wearing themselves out like a freezer brownie-fueled bedtime pit-crew, just trying to put your grandchildren to bed, and—as crazy as it sounds—you will miss it.

At least for a minute or two. Pass the coffee and/or brownies.

How ’bout you? Have you ever survived the bedtime Apocalypse? 😉