Kids' sleeping, a pleasant surprise - H

Here's a parenting question I'm thinking about right now. At what age do you start hauling your kids around to your activities and regard their sleep schedules less? Never? Does one parent or both always take the kids home when it's time for them to sleep and miss out on stuff? Is it when they outgrow naps? While I appreciate having some free evenings when Julia goes down early in the evening, it would be nice to have the flexibility not to have to be home during prime time or not to be bound to the house when she's supposed to be sleeping, and to be able to go places with E and have both of us be there together once in a while - something even like grocery shopping. At least with J it's relatively easy to keep her up b/c she likes not sleeping, so if she's up past her bedtime she's pretty easy as long as she's occupied. I'm not sure. I just wonder if it's really bad for her development in some way, or if it would really turn out to be harder for us if we did this in terms of managing J's behavior. Maybe we just have to decide and see what happens. So much of parenting is trial and error, isn't it?

I had a good time this weekend hosting an old friend of mine. He was here doing a talk on his book and NK stuff at Authors @ Google, and we invited him to our church to share a bit and went out to lunch with anyone interested in NK issues. I was expecting one family who I know is involved with NK work, but I was pleasantly surprised that it ended up being a much bigger group than I thought. Actually, half of the group that came out to lunch ended up being people that don't attend our church regularly but came b/c they wanted to meet up with my friend and were interested in hearing more about NK or are involved already and wanted to connect. Very cool! I personally felt very excited about it...I guess that I was able to facilitate the making of these connections. I was very happy about it.