Bedtime v. age

I think that total time asleep matters way more than what the bedtime is per se.

What's his calmdown routine? We've found that sozlet needs a lot of time to wind down from a late-evening activity, so for example if she goes to something that ends at 9:30 she needs a buffer of 1 to 1.5 hours before the end of the activity and actually falling asleep and we can't expect her to fall asleep until 10:30 or 11.

If Mo has something similar, a 10:30 or 11 bedtime may be stretching things (how much time does he need in the mornings to get ready? I know you guys have talked about playing basketball before school...)

We usually head upstairs at 8:30 or 9, then sozlet actually falls asleep somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00 depending on how tired she is, and wakes up at about 7:30 AM. 10 hours of sleep is plenty for her, 9 hours is enough. Anything below 9 hours and she doesn't function well.

Theoretically he can be "ready" for school in just a few minutes but is he ready for school? That's the trick. We need 15-20 minutes for basketball and 15-20 minutes for homework so if we scrimped we could go from bed to classroom in about 40 minutes.

The music school and the teacher of this class are a known so I don't imagine his wind-down would be much different from any other day except that it would push everything back an hour.

Does he take music classes that end at 8:30, now?

Sozlet doesn't have issues unless there's a THING happening that ends late -- then she has issues. (The thing can be social or a class or whatever -- but she needs to wind down from it in a different way than she does with just a usual evening at home. The known-ness doesn't have an effect one way or another -- there's a thing she goes to regularly that ends at 9 PM, she always takes a while to wind down from it.)

But this falls under "all kids are different," too.

Yes, most certainly, they're all different!

For Mo, if it's a known place and person things are pretty calm, when it's a one time deal things get waaaayyyy out of control.

The class isn't an immediate threat, baseball starts this week and I won't let him do three different activities at a time, two is even very hard.

I was really wondering more in general terms -- what age and what time and when to make allowances.

11 and 8, and they go to bed at 9ish. Wake up around 6ish.

7 and 9 and "bedtime" is 8:30. That just means in the bed, though. Duckie reads for about an hour after that. Ducklet usually takes 1.5 hours to wind down, but she's just like that and always has been. They get up at 7.

Tough call on the drum class. If it ends at 9:30 doesn't that mean he'd be going to bed at 10? Might be pushing it. I guess that's the only time it's offered?

My daughter always needed a lot of sleep and still does. She's so active during
the day that by 9:00 pm she's beat. She gets up around 6:15 am.
When she was 8 years old she was in bed by 8:00.

6 and 10 years old; 8:00 and 8:30 - they get up about 7:00. On the weekends we are pretty flexible with them and we often let them camp out in the living room on the weekends.

Our little charmer is five years old and he’s in bed by 8:30 every night. We really don’t have a problem with putting him to sleep, he’s so use to being in bed the same time he’s usually falling asleep before we tell him it’s time for bed

So is Morgan, sound asleep already!