An Adjustment

Peyton has started his new school, and he's doing pretty well. His teacher told me that he had one of the best first weeks she has ever had with a new kid. Patrick told me she tells everyone that, but I'm going to believe that she was telling me the truth. But he seems to be doing well there. They have a different theme each week and they focus on different topics within that theme each day. One week they did music, another they did sports. Last week they did feelings. Now, when he's mad about something, he tells me he's "grumpy." They have lots of toys and trucks to play with and a big yard outside where they play twice a day.

While things were going pretty well at school, we noticed that he started waking up super early in the morning and waking up in the middle of the night, which he very rarely did before. He came in our room one night around 2:30am talking about the blue airplane outside his window. He went on and on and on....in my incoherent state at 2:30am, I kept putting him back in his bed, and he kept coming back! Patrick had a little more sense about him and finally rocked Peyton back to sleep. We came to the conclusion that he was missing all of the hugs and cuddle time that he got with us, and Mrs. Lauren when he was with her. He just seemed to want to be held a little more, which was totally fine with me!

However, all the hugs in the world wasn't preventing him from coming to our room at 5am to tell us that he was awake and ready to watch cartoons. We'd bring him back to his bed and he'd come wandering back to our room a few minutes later. At a more appropriate time, we would just get up. In his mind, if he was persistent enough, we would just give in. For him, he didn't seem to be grasping the concept that there was an actual time when it was time to get out of bed.

We decided that he was a little too young to tell time, but started looking for something that would help him understand the difference between night and day. And it was time to be drastic. $35 for a freakin' night light seemed a little extreme to me, but I decided that if I could sleep until 6:30am (I've stopped dreaming of ever sleeping until 8am again!) it would be worth every single penny. So we invested in the Good Nite Lite and crossed our fingers that this would help him understand the difference. We set the timer in the back so that at 8pm, the night light looks like a moon. At 6:30am, it turns into a sun. Well, by golly, it worked! He gets so excited about waiting for the sun to come up. There have been several mornings where I can hear him in his room talking to himself or singing, but he stays in there until he sees the sun. And then he throws his door open and comes running in our room to tell us that he sees the sun!

Our master plan backfired slightly this weekend, however, when it was time to take a nap. He informed us that the moon wasn't on. Right. We wondered at that point whether we would have to buy another one of these lights so that he would take a nap. Luckily, we convinced him that it was ok to take a nap without the moon. The pleasant part was that when he woke up from his nap, he stayed in his room because he didn't see the sun. Hee hee. I was tempted to use this to my advantage, but decided that I didn't want to push things, so I went and got him up.

This morning, I was afraid it had all come to an end. He woke up about 5:45am and came to our room to tell us that he needed to potty, which is fine, we have no problem with that. But my concern at 5:45am was that I had 45 minutes more to sleep and I figured I could just kiss those precious minutes good-bye. After he went potty, I told him that the moon was still on so that meant it wasn't time to get up. I explained that he needed to go back to bed until he saw the sun. I figured he would come back 15 times in the next 45 minutes. But back in his bed he went and he stayed there until 6:30am. Now, of course I didn't go back to sleep because I expected that at any minute he was going to come running back into our room. But I'm ready to sing the praises of this night light because it actually works!

Taking the responsibility off of us as to whether he's supposed to stay in bed or get up has made things much easier. He's willing to listen to the sun and the moon. Is there another light out there to tell him when to pick up his toys? Or when to wash his hands? Oh, the possibilities!