Early to rise

This is the first month in which Isaac has regularly awoken prior to 7:00 a.m., and I'm tired. As you can see from this sleep probability chart for his 19th month, we can really only count on him to sleep until 6:45 a.m. Yes, there's a tiny shadow of gray up until 8:00 a.m., which means he slept that late maybe two out of the previous 21 days, but it's nothing like it used to be, when I could count on a few late mornings every single week to catch up on my sleep.
















His bedtime is pretty darn consistent, however. Consistently late, that is. No longer can we count on the 12-hour rule -- that Isaac would be awake 12 hours out of a 24-hour period. No, now he seems to have a fixed bedtime. He doesn't fall asleep until 9:00 p.m. no matter how early we start his bedtime routine, how long he's been awake, or how tired he is.

So during his 19th month he's been sleeping nine hours at night and napping for two or three hours in the afternoon. Perhaps it's once again time to try to reapportion his sleep. How about a 10-hour night and a two-hour nap? Two months ago we tried waking him up from his nap after he'd slept "long enough," but it didn't seem to produce the desired effect.

Don't get me wrong, I love his long naps -- these days I've been spending them gardening -- but the correspondingly short nights are killing me. I guess I could get enough sleep if I went to sleep immediately after he does and if I could fall back asleep easily after getting up at night, but that never seems to happen. It's 10:00 p.m. now, though, and I'm going to stop writing this and go to bed.