I get twitchy.

It's 8:39 and I'm twitchy.

Why?  Because it's 8:39, and even though I put my children to bed at the appropriate time, one of them has come back upstairs and it milling around, reading over my shoulder, playing in the Scentsy warmer in the bathroom . . . .   I repeat the old Mercer Mayer book title, Just Go to Bed! so often in these cases.
What's that?  Ahhh . . .  the child has wandered back to bed.
Twitching has subsided.

It's funny, but over the past--almost 11--years, my body has developed the ability to internally know when it is 8:00.  If I feel myself starting to get unusually impatient, I can pretty much guarantee that the clock has slipped past our children's set bed time.  It's probably because there have been plenty of days over the years that I have told it, "We just need to make it to 8:00, body, we can do it!  Just twelve more hours!"  Now it knows it is a finish line of sorts.

Even though life around here isn't as intense as it once was (most days), I still start to get twitchy when it is after 8:00 and there are still children wandering about.  We spend a lot of good, quality time together during the day.  GOOD and A LOT.  So, 8:00 is bedtime and that is that.

It actually makes it very easy to start a new school year in the fall.  We don't ever have to get back into the bedtime routine, because for the most part, it has stayed the same.

Sometimes, of course, summer calls for staying up past 8:00, and there have been several evenings away from home that I've had call on a few more mom super-powers and get over it.  When we're on vacation, for example, and parenting needs to be done after 8:00, I often default to Dad.  Really, anything more than, "Mom, can I have a glass of water?" is too much for me to process at that point.  Mom needs a recharge.

Now we've reached the magic hour again, when I am only equipped to make one decision regarding my immediate future--ice cream or a Raz-berita on ice?