Waaaaaaaay Too Early

This is what I get for being cocky. I was reading this post over at Baby Bunching: and thinking how lucky I was that I no longer had any early risers.

7am was the normal waking time around here. While that is still earlier than I would choose, it still seems more like morning than the middle of the night.

I was remembering when Monkey was a baby(and still an only child) and he insisted on waking up every morning at 5am or even a little before that. He was always WIDE awake and demanding breakfast. I would feed him and then try to get him to play while I was still completely out of it and counting down the hours until he was ready for a nap. Thankfully, that would happen around 8am and I would go back to sleep, too.

Those days were so hard. I felt like a zombie and I never did know when to get out of my pjs and actually get dressed. Usually not until after that first morning nap, but sometimes not even then, since I'd wait until his second nap of the day to take a shower.

Bear was a much kinder sleeper(kinder to me). He too would wake up at 5am most days, but after a nursing, he would drift off again for another two hours. Cub followed this pattern for quite a while, too.

But, now, Cub is up every morning sometime between 5:30 and 6am. That still feels like nighttime. Something about 7am makes it seem like the day has started, but 6 or earlier...that's still time for sleep.

Because of this, he's now ready for a nap by about 9 or 9:30. And this time, there is NO napping for Mommy. There are two other kiddos running around and things to do. Sometimes he'll take an afternoon nap, too, but again, no napping for Mommy. Monkey doesn't nap and Bear only occasionally crashes on the couch or wherever he happens to be when he runs out of steam. And, since the two big boys share a room, it doesn't work to send them there and make them have "quiet time" or "rest time."

My kiddos do go to bed early- starting at 6:30pm, with the last of them down by 7:30. It doesn't make a difference what time they go to sleep, though, they all still follow their same wake-up patterns...so, I figure they might as well go to bed early and at least wake up rested. It's bad enough to have children up at the crack of dawn, the last thing I want is CRABBY children who are up at the crack of dawn.

I'm hoping that this is just some sort of phase. Teething or something, I don't know. And then we can go back to the much more civilized time of 7am to wake up.