Early to Bed and Early to Rise...

...makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. So said Poor Richard, aka Benjamin Franklin.

That may be true of a man, but for a baby, early to bed and early to rise makes for a cranky momma. Unless she is lucky, like me, and wonderful Daddy got up early with the baby this morning and let her sleep in.

Ryan doesn't really have a set daytime schedule yet, but he is falling into a nice nightime routine of tubby time at 8pm or so, followed by one last bottle and then bed at 9:00 or 9:30. He generally sleeps straight through till 7:30, no matter whether he goes down a little earlier or a little later. But every once in a while he throws us off by either getting up as early as 6:30 or sleeping as late as 8:00. Sleeping till 8 is just fine by me, and I'd love that if he'd do it every day. But that hour between 6:30 and 7:30 is a killer. I think the minutes prior to 8am automatically double in sleep value. So missing that hour is like missing two hours at another time.

During the day, I can sometimes manipulate his nap length by getting him to play really hard beforehand and then giving him a big bottle. Physical exhaustion + food coma = up to a 3-hour nap, hooray! But at night, he seems to be less flexible. I'd love to know what it is that tells him it's 7:30 and time to wake up. The neighbors leave for work at 6:00 (poor souls) so it's not the sound of their car engine starting. The sun rises at roughly 6:30, so it's not light creeping through the blinds. Heaven knows, it's not Daddy and Mommy's alarm clock that he can hear down the hall! I guess it's just some secret ingrained genetic clock, the same thing that tells the swallows when to return to Capistrano or the salmon when to start swimming upstream or the grizzly bears when to come out of hibernation.

So there's probably nothing I can do about it but get to bed a bit earlier myself. After all, if early to bed and early to rise makes a man (or woman) healthy, wealthy and wise, Ryan's just helping nudge me towards perfect health, piles of riches, and the wisdom of Solomon!