Bumps in the night, monsters under the bed!

Recently, a friend with a 3-year-old started having trouble keeping her son in bed after bedtime. Scary things were keeping him awake at night, monster creeping out from the closet, the dark taking on strange shapes…

So, I reached into my bag of parenting tricks from when Tommy and Ami were little things with big imaginations.

The most helpful thing is a good bedtime routine. No, I’m not talking about the tooth-brushing part, I’m talking about a monster-hunting routine!

Your arsenal?

Monster Be Gone Spray
1 empty spray bottle (50 cents in the travel section of Tram-Law/MegaLoMart)
8 drops of lavender essential oil (health food stores, but ask at Tram-Law)
Water
Label (address label, or you can tape on a piece of paper)

Fill your spray bottle with water, and drop in the lavender oil. Shake. Have your child decorate a label for your Monster Be Gone Spray. Print on the label: WARNING: Extremely toxic to monsters. Spritz blankets with Monster Be Gone each night at bedtime. Guaranteed to keep monsters at bay!

Lavender is a great soothing scent for bedtime, and the kids will get a lot out of the ritual of looking under the bed and then spritzing their sheets a bit. (Mom might want to try it on her sheets, too.)

A Good Bedtime Book
An important part of this anti-creepy crawlies bedtime routine is a good book. After they have sprayed their bed to repel monsters, settle in for a nice story.

One of my favorites is James Stevenson’s What’s Under My Bed?, a multi-generational story about kids who imagine scary things in the night. The nice thing about this one is that the kids start out imagining something under the bed, but end up telling Grampa that all the scary things at night that he remembered from when he was a kid were just perfectly normal, harmless things. Skeletons on the roof? Tree branches, silly! Bats in his room? His book pages fluttering in the wind, of course.

As the children correct their grampa about what he was imagining, the message comes through. Those creepy things you hear at night are just shadows and other things we don’t think twice about during the day.

A Good Night Light
I love night lights. With my bad eyes, bumbling around the dark is DANGEROUS. (Plus, I’m a klutz, forget the kids) So, luckily for my two kids, I am quick to buy night lights. Not only do you need a night light to keep monsters at bay, a good night light is ESSENTIAL for helping kids get to the bathroom in time at potty training age.

For monsters, I really like color-changing night lights for some reason. I think it is because they don’t cast shadows. But I’ve recently fallen very hard for these night lights that sit in a charging base, and double as a flash light the kids can take with them. BRILLIANT.

A Monster in Your Closet
What? I thought we DIDN’T want monsters in our closet? Well, this monster is okay! He might be hard to get your hands on today, but you could certainly replicate it. Some of you may remember the movie Stepmom (Julia Roberts/Susan Sarandon kick in the guts movie), but in that movie a toy from a now-defunct company, Rumpus, hung in the closet of one of the children. Monster in My Closet was a stuffed monster (the silly sort, not the scary sort) that you hung on the closet rod. This nice friendly monster keeps all of the “other” monsters out.

Ami passed hers down to Tommy when he was a little thing. Aren’t big sisters the best? Even if you can’t find your own Monster, you could make one.

Do scary things chase your kids out of their beds and into yours at night? There are some pretty hilarious and helpful posts from other moms in the same boat over at the Parent Bloggers Network . Let me know if any of my bedtime monster hunt tricks help your family sleep through the night!