sleep journal

So the sleep front is getting a little more systematic for Tobo, if not acutally better. We have tweaked a number of things about his schedule and eating opportunities such as:

• shorten nap to 1.5 hours on busy days, even at daycare.
  
• skip nap all together on stuck-in-the-house snow days.
  
• only water and goldfish (next to his bed) after lights out.
• milk and cheese right before bed are fine.
• later dinner (6p) that runs right into bath or run around fun time.
• running around time segues into floor play (puzzles or trains, etc.)
  
• which segues into bedtime story time around 8:30p.
• Lights out by 9p
  
• Door stopper put on door. new rule, door closing stops at bed time.
  

And it is here that I still ended up negotiating for half an hour with the boy about going to bed. I actually had to do a threat. Threats are things we try not to use as a rule. Do not threaten, do. Threat is now. (I totally got that from a science fiction book, btw) But tonight I basically used it as a summary tool: "Remember all the bad stuff that happened the last time you did this? I can do that again OR you can quit the silliness and not suffer the penalty...but you have to comply right now." It turned into some kind of hard sell. And it worked! Like for more than 30 minutes.

The good news is we are no longer having the door-slamming, yelling, feet-dragging, runner bed time routine. I am really thankful for that because I found that really infuriating. He was still up a couple of times last night (the first night we really tried the new stuff all together) but he didn't get up, he just cried in bed. (At one point he was too a sleep to find his stuffed animal who had fallen out of the bed.) So it was still a lot of awake-ness during a time when were suppose to be asleep...but better than the alternative.

Because of Tobo was rested, he was really able to get with the program in the morning. We were still late getting going, mainly because we all overslept by an hour due to being up 3 times during the night. I just figure we were on a Hoemke 30 minute snow delay. These are the days were I think if it takes this much effort for one, what ever would we do with two?