So maybe many people breeze through the time changes and their children adapt well to an hour longer in bed (if only) but for those of you who struggle with an hour more or an hour less I thought i'd write a few notes on how we have reduced the strain of waking at 4.30am when our boy thinks its almost morning!
An hour in the life of our little guy is an eternity. We were commenting just yesterday how much we do in a day now we have him. No wonder we're in bed by 9pm!!!! So an hour change in time can be quite disruptive to a small body. How did we help him to adjust?
Like any change in routine we did it gradually. Two days before the clocks changed I started to move his routine by 15 minutes. He had dinner a little later and all the evening routines went on this pattern so he went to bed 15 minutes later than normal. The first night it made no difference to his wake up time the next morning but the following day I went another 15 minutes later (now 30 minutes later than his normal routine) and he stayed in bed about 15 minutes later the next morning. The third night was the same - routine 15 minutes later (now 45 minutes later than normal) - this is the night the clocks went back. This morning he woke at 4.15 (which would have been 5.15am on his old routine). I gave him some water and put him back to bed. I expected him to complain as it was near his normal wake up time of 6am, but as we had made a slow adjustment his body must have told him he needed a little bit more rest and he went back to sleep until 5.45am (which would have been 6.45am on his old routine). All in all not a bad start to Sunday morning!
Today we are keeping him on his normal times (which will be an hour earlier than his old routine). He doesn't seem to have noticed the few days of change and we feel well rested too so heres hoping our method has worked and he wakes at 6am tomorrow ready for the week.
Have you had any problems with the time change, or any solutions which might work better than ours? Please let us know.
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