We were taking the twins on vacation and I was franticly making lists, organizing items, and wondering how I could best recreate their near-to-perfect nighttime routine so far away from home. For at home, we were blessed with an easy and tear-free bedtime, at the same time, seven-thirty every night.

For our (Ok, my own) survival the first years, I constructed a veritable fortress of routines, schedules, familiar items, playlists, flavors, aromas and sceneries. Their lives were choreographed like a Disney sponsored Broadway play, and even in that script, storms raged and meltdowns ensued. But I had a scaffold of sameness that I held us up with and leaned on when times got tough. Sameness was a shelter, a shell that kept us humming happily down to nod at the end of every day.

Still in cribs, but destined to stay in big beds on this trip, their crib toys had one by one gone the way of burned out motors. I’d utilized them to create a sense of familiarity when we stayed at my mothers, the only other place they had spent a night. I searched the internet for something similar, something fun that would last as they got a little older, and there it was, Twilight Turtle.

Turtles seem protected to me, self-sufficient, and calm. Perhaps that is why I have always been drawn to them, a totem of my youth, constantly telling myself to “slow down” while I carried a satchel filled with whatever I would need if I became lost to my home, adrift in the world on some grand adventure.

This little guy (I haven’t asked my kids what gender it is, so I will just defer to the masculine since he seems like a “little guy” to me), casts a starry night sky with eight constellations onto the ceiling, in a choice of three colors: orange, blue or green. He shuts off after 45 minutes, and he makes three AAA batteries feel like it’s the good old days when batteries actually lasted, or perhaps I was just young then and time seemed like it lasted a lot longer.

The first night we had him, we asked what color they wanted the stars to be. Favorite colors are a big deal when you are two, so we negotiated orange for him one night, green for her the next. We made it through the vacation, granted we ate dinner listening to them howl on a baby monitor before rushing back down to get them settled again. But eventually Star Turtle, as he came to be named, settled in to a constant shade of green. So much so that we started a game of asking, “orange?” to screams of “NO!!!”, “blue?” again the “NOOOO!” and always laughing back to green and a good night, sleep tight, and we promised to stop saying anything about those nasty bedbugs, love you g’night.

Strangely, it only occurred to me as I sat down to write this, that when asked what my favorite color was by my children, I decided on green. Mommy’s favorite color from then on has been green; green playing pieces in games, green cups if there is a selection, and my daughter is usually the one who makes certain I have my color. She is specific like that. Personally, I like all of the colors, but when you are dealing with the concrete minds of children, sometimes it’s easier to just pick a lane.

Last night my daughter told her Daddy that she’s older now and she doesn’t really need the stars anymore, but brother likes them so they can stay for awhile. They have a divided room with a wall that doesn’t go all the way up to the ceiling, so we balance the Star turtle on the dividing wall and they can both see the stars at night. He has a scratched shell, the casing around the green button has fallen into the body and rattles around and you have to really poke your finger in there to turn him on. But for four years he has given us our own night sky, dependable, familiar, and green. And I will probably save him and turn the stars on long after my children have grown.