Spring Forward, Fall Back

This coming weekend, many of us will be adjusting our clocks for daylight savings time. This is the switch that most people don’t really mind. For the first few days you can tell yourself you got an “extra” hour of sleep.

But I’m worried. I’m worried that one alarm clock in particular, won’t get re-set. That’s the one that exists only in the mind of our two-year old. The one which wakes him up, without fail at 4:30am daily. I’ve told you before about his sleeping habits. He just doesn’t like to sleep.

So, Sunday morning may start a round of our household getting up an hour earlier than everyone else. Believe me, 4:30 is early enough. 3:30 might drive me a little crazy. 
We bought a nifty toddler alarm clock recently, in hopes that it would entice our tiny insomniac to sleep in a bit. It worked twice. Now we still set it every night (turning the light to red is a favorite bedtime activity now), but he’s up and about long before the silly thing turns green (and we set it for what we feel is a very conservative 5:15).

Oh well, the one big advantage to having an early bird in the house is that we have a lot of bonus time together that your average family with two working parents would’t have. Many mornings, we’ve eaten breakfast, dressed, painted pictures, built block towers, sung songs and played with flashcards – all before 6am. So, for that reason I don’t entirely mind getting up early.

3:30 is just too early though…way too early.

So, this week we are slowly moving his bedtime later and later. For the record, we’ve tried making bedtime later before, with no long term success. Hoping for a breakthrough this time. Our plan is that when the weekend gets here we’ll have him stay up a couple hours later than usual, in hopes of resetting that inner clock. It might work. It might not. It might just cause him to take a long nap on Sunday.

Cross your fingers for us… and if you see our light on at 3:15, send coffee.

Lots and lots of coffee.