Rise and shine

The 5:30 a.m. wakeups continue. Ay yi yi. Do you know how early 5:30 a.m. is? Do you know how early it is when your three-year-old stalled about going to sleep until 10 p.m. (!) the night before?

Y'all know me. You know that I've been fairly rigid about William's bedtime as long as he's had one. Unless there's a special occasion or we have company visiting, we expect William to go to bed at his bedtime, settle down and stay in bed, end of story. It even worked until very recently. We didn't even have that much trouble after the transition to the big boy bed, except for a few nights. But these late-evening stalling episodes are just delaying his actual bedtime, and because he's getting up early no matter what, it's just reducing the total amount of sleep he's going. Which is Not Good. Oy.

Due to the stalling and the early rising, I'm estimating that William got about seven hours of sleep last night. Maybe seven-and-a-half. That's enough for me to function, but this is William we're talking about. High Octane Boy. Without enough sleep, he tends to get wired and wired and more wired, and that just exacerbates the problem because then he gets too wired to settle down. And it just snowballs.

I think I could deal if it was just nighttime stalling or just early wakeups, but both? No. We've tried everything we could think of to nip this in the bud, but so far, nothing's worked. Some friends have given me a couple of new ideas--set an alarm to come on when it's time to get up and explain the time on the digital clock to him and tell him what number will be showing when it's time to get up--so we may try those soon.

Feel free to remind me about all this when William's 15, and I'm trying to drag his body out of bed so he won't be late to high school.