Monday, April 06, 2009

Early mornings

For the past 2 weeks or so, I've been getting up between 6 and 6:30 in an attempt to have some quiet time to work. I think better in the morning, so this is a practice that has worked for me in the past. Even if I'm only about to stake out 30 minutes for myself I use that time to map out my day and figure out what needs to be done. This worked for the first week or so, and then Wild Man started waking up about 15 minutes after me.

In the past few months we have worked out lots of sleeping issues with him (sorry, I'm not blogging about any of these issues because as soon as I do, Wild Man will regress and we'll have to tackle them all over again!). The one issue that we haven't worked out is the fact that he wants me first thing in the morning. This isn't helped by the fact that C is virtually impossible to get up in the morning. If I let Wild Man holler until C woke up, I'd be listening to him holler for at least 15 minutes! So the past few mornings, Wild Man has joined me when I get up early to work. In fact, as I type this, he is watching "Thomas the Tank Engine." So this hasn't been the most productive of mornings, but at least I was greeted with Wild Man saying, "I love you, Mommy," when I walked into his room a little while ago.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We put a clock in Luke's room and told him that he cannot get up (leave his room) until 7:00. It works great for us. Maybe you could do the same for Wild Man, if he knows his numbers. If he doesn't, I have also heard of people buying a cheap face clock, putting a sticker on the hour hand, and coloring in a slice of time for waking up...if the sticker isn't in the highlighted area when they look at the clock, it's too early to wake up.

M said...

We've talked about this, but we have decided against it for now. Wild Man has been in his twin bed for about 6 weeks, and he's still using a bed rail. While he can get out of it on his own, he can't quite get in it on his own--the few times he's tried (with one of us standing there) he's slipped and hit his chin. So we've made a rule that he can't get out of bed or into bed on his own. It seems unfair to make him stay in his bed until 7.

C and I talked this morning and came to a conclusion. I have to get over my maternal guilt about having to devote the next 2 weeks to my dissertation and C has to actually get out of bed the minute he hears Wild Man, even if I'm already out of bed. We'll see how it goes.