Sleep

A few thoughts on sleep:

• When I'm tired, the littlest thing like spilled milk or a leaky diaper - five minutes after changing the last one! - can make me cry.
• But a short nap can turn my day around.
  
• Although logic would have it that a child who wakes up too early should simply be put to bed later, the experts say this is wrong -- put a child to sleep later and he'll still wake up at whatever early hour his inner clock has decided to wake up at every day. In our case, we struggled for months to get our firstborn to sleep until 6am; if he went to bed a little later than his usual bedtime, he'd be up at 5 or 5:30am! However, Marc Weissbluth, author of Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, a book I swear by, does concede that occasionally, a too early wake up time can be corrected with a later bedtime. (Several other factors have to exist, such as your child being well-rested and having a regular routine.) We tried it, and it worked!!! So for the past week, Firstborn has been sleeping until 6:30am!!
• This morning, for who knows what reason, he didn't wake up until almost 7am!! I cannot adequately express how much good those extra twenty minutes did me! (Of course Newborn decided to wake up at the exact same time, which is another story. At this age, I think I prefer staggered wake up times!)
• A carefully-timed cup of coffee (immediately after a feed so as not to affect Newborn at his next feed; far enough ahead of my own opportunity for a nap so I don't miss out on that) can immediately bring me out of a sleepy stupor and fool me into believing I've had the most restful night of sleep ever.
• Last night Newborn only woke up once (at 2:30am). Shocking, but I'm not questioning it.