With one kid, bedtime was almost suspiciously simple. Two books, sometimes three if she negotiated well. Counting the stars on the ceiling. Carry her to bed. Done. I remember finding that routine tiring at the time, which feels almost funny now.
Two kids changed the maths completely, especially with my husband often on late calls, which meant it was just me and two kids most nights. For a while, my youngest of the two was still a baby, so I’d feed her on one side while sitting on the floor reading a book to her older sister on the other. Different rooms back then — I’d settle them both, then carry the baby over to her own room once she was out. We merged the rooms around her first birthday, and bedtime became one scene instead of two: me in the middle, one kid on each side, two or three books, then off to sleep.
Made-up stories came later — somewhere around my third pregnancy, when just reading books stopped being enough some nights. We’d do the usual books, then I’d improvise a story on top. After a while, on the nights I was too depleted to invent anything coherent, I started leaning on AI to help build the story — their favourite characters, whatever theme they wanted that night, assembled into something I could read out loud without having to write it from scratch at 8pm on empty. They love it exactly as much as the ones I make up myself, which I’ve decided not to take personally.
Then came the third. As a newborn, bedtime with him was almost easy by comparison — feed him, settle the girls one on each side of me with a book in the middle, and he’d often doze off on a little mattress in their room before I carried him to his own later. Easy, that is, until he turned into a toddler who climbs anything within reach. Now he just wanders and plays in their room while I read, which sounds relaxed and isn’t — most of my attention goes to making sure he doesn’t climb something he shouldn’t, rather than to the book in my hands.
About a year ago we added reading practice for school, which sounded simple in theory: my younger one reads a little book to herself, my older one reads a chapter from a chapter book to herself, then I read them a story. In practice, it means two kids reading out loud — not in their heads, out loud — in the same small room, at the same time, while a toddler waddles around underfoot. Two completely different stories, narrated simultaneously, half-overlapping, into the same four walls. It is, genuinely, very funny chaos. I suggested headphones at one point so they couldn’t hear each other. I’ve also wondered about sending one to read in the living room and keeping one in the bedroom. I haven’t landed on the right answer yet — but they do need the practice, so for now we just let the chaos happen and read our actual story once the two competing audiobooks have wrapped up.
Talking to clients who are also mums, I don’t think there’s one version of this that’s right. Some split the kids between two parents. Some have a helper handle the whole routine. It depends on how many kids you have, whether a parent travels for work, whether one child has decided they’ll only settle for a particular person. We’re still rewriting ours every few months, honestly, because it never holds still long enough to call finished. But for now, this is what it looks like: books, stories, a song, and one small determined person refusing to miss any of it.
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