We are having a bit of a bedtime battle with Little O these days.
While I and then Husband were on parental leave, he was used to waking at around 7am, having a leisurely breakfast and then going to preschool for a 9am start. Now that both of us are back at work, however, Little O has to be at preschool at 7.30am – on the plus side, I can pick him up earlier and we have the long spring afternoons for play.
Over the past couple of months, we have had some problems getting him to stay in bed and go to sleep before about 8.30pm. This wasn’t ever night though, so we thought that it might correlate with how much he was sleeping during the day at preschool.
So we asked them to restrict his nap to 40 minutes and crossed our fingers that this would help. And at first it did, but then we realised that some days he would nap for half an hour or so and the next he would not nap at all, and we were again seeing him appear in the living room when he should be tucked up in bed asleep. (Another problem is just how cute he looks when he runs in to chat with us after bedtime – it is hard not to be amused – bad, I know.)
We decided that, at that point, there was not so much to be done as Little O would soon be switching from a 9am to a 7.30am start at preschool, and we thought that would solve the problem after a few days.
We’re now a week in to him starting earlier and the bedtime situation is only getting worse. We’ve had evenings when he makes every excuse possible not to sleep, nights when he has got up 12-15 times, and it culminated last night with me taking him in to our bed with me at 9.40pm when he still was not asleep. And the worst is that he was so very, very tired, but so very, very determined to stay awake.
What have you done in these situations? Do you think this just needs a few more days to resolve itself? Or a should we be looking for new strategies?
It really is something when a nearly three year old is awake later than his mamma…
Filed under: Post, Toddler
