Falling Back . . . Toddler Style

Falling back is a different and potentially desperate event when you have a toddler. The question is not, "How will I spend today's bonus hour? Sleeping? Reading a novel? Reorganizing my closet?" but rather: "Will I be teeing up a Sesame Street episode at 5:30 this morning?" You see, young ones like the bub understand biological clocks, not alarm clocks. We have had many a conversation with the bub during which we plead with him, "But, honey, it's still 4:45 in the morning. Night-night time. Night-night time. Please, please, we beg of you. Back to bed. Night-night." For many months now, we have enjoyed a 6:30 wake-up time, which we consider a luxury as the bub's current sleep pattern was preceded by a long and consistent stretch of wake-ups in the 5:00 hour. In the mornings leading up to Sunday's fall back, we actually had a couple of days where he slept until 7:13 and 7:21, respectively. (A 7:15-ish wake-up is the equivalent of sleeping in until noon at our house.) So anyway, with the recent sleep-ins, we were hopeful about the morning of falling back. We put the bub to bed slightly later on Saturday evening (not too much later because that tends to backfire on us). The bub babbled a bit at 5:04. We held our breaths, ignored him, and, what do you know, we were rewarded with a 6:38 wake-up time--which would have been 7:38 just the day before: an absolute miracle!. I have to say that a glorious day ensued. The sun was shining, and it was actually a long (in a good way) and relaxing Sunday. NTB.

Of course, the bub woke up this morning at 4:30. The hubby threw him in bed with us, and he went back to sleep in his favorite spot, with his head right smack in the middle of my pillow. I sleep a little less soundly when I'm sideways with roughly five inches to work with, and I made the grievous error of getting up to visit the bathroom at 5:30 a.m. The bub stirred and was up. Was it falling back or my bladder that was to blame? We can't know for sure.

What I do know is that the 4:30 - 7:30 p.m. interval is about to get a whole lot darker and longer. I worked until 5:00 p.m. today. After saying goodbye to our sitter, the bub and I played with his plastic food in the basement during the time it took to do a load of laundry with all his footy pajamas. Having transferred his clothes to the dryer, we headed up stairs to battle over the kitchen chair, an ongoing tussle these days. The bub likes to move a breakfast table chair so that he can climb on the counter to investigate the spice cabinet, play with the dirty sponges in the sink, shake pepper on the counter, grab apples off the island and take random bites of them while demanding "wash, wash," and, new today, attempt to adjust the thermostat. I try to sit in the chair so he cannot move it. Typically, when the chair is finally returned to the breakfast table, one of us is in or near tears. In addition to basement time and the battle of the chair, we read books, colored, ate dinner, and did the nightly bath routine (no code brown this evening, NTB). Even with tonight's prolonged conflict over the post-bath routine in which the bub gets lotioned, diapered, and dressed--he preferred this evening to run naked in circles around a large diaper box until he got so dizzy that he would fall and laugh in delight--even with all of these activities, when the bub was fed, clean, and dressed for bed, I looked at the clock and realized that it was only 6:35! It's going to be a long winter, luckily the bub will be here to light up our dark nights . . . and our dark mornings.