I don’t care if the early bird gets the worm, I don’t want the worm. I want the sleep.
For a solid week now Sam has been waking up at around 5-5:30a. We’ve tried everything. Letting her fuss in her crib till 6, bringing her to bed, giving her morning bottle early and then trying to put her back down…nothing works. The kid still is up and ready to go at 5a. Freakin‘ 5a! I’m sorry but unless you have to get up for work or school, waking in the 5 o clock hour is sooo not ok. I could at least do 6a but 5? 5 is just mean.
Some friends tell me I should put her down earlier, “sleep begets sleep”, but when I put her down earlier she just gets up earlier. Right now bedtime is 7p and that’s pushing it…she starts rubbing her eyes at 6 and by 6:30 is dozing off. We do a bath around then to buy some more time but as soon as those pjs go on she’s downhill quick. I found this link on babycenter.com which seems to say that I need to extend her bedtime, maybe by 10 minutes a day, until 7:30p, 8p at the latest. Her second nap of the day is at 1p and is usually an hour and a half…going from 2:30 till 7:30p is a lot for her. Ughhhh, I HATE trying to figure out a schedule that works. It feels like everytime we get one down things change & it doesn’t work anymore. At the beginning of this blog I said that one of my resolutions was to get Sam on a schedule and in the picture you could see that I had taped a little handwritten daily schedule for Sam to the fridge for us to follow. Do you know how many times I’ve had to rewrite that schedule? Twelve. It’s exhausting & I’m so tempted to say schedules just don’t work for us but it’s even worse to not have a schedule. She gets out of control…quick. I dunno, I guess we’ll try the extending the bedtime thing, maybe she should be taking a third nap too? Is 7 mths old too old for a late afternoon nap?
I love your blog Natasha. I don’t have kids yet, but reading it makes me look forward to motherhood.