Problem?...Solved

So earlier this month I was having difficulty with Hannah getting up by herself and random hours in the night. This was solved by the simple threat of punishment. Thankfully no discipline was actually required.

The new problem was that she wanted to get up at 6am. This would have been fine if she would play quietly in her room for a couple of hours (wouldn't that be nice). But instead the first thing she does is run to our room and to my side of the bed and exclaim, "Foooood, mommy, foooood." Obviously not cool at 6am or 7:15 in the morning. This was temporarily solved by me telling her that, "it's still dark out. You can't get up until it's light out." So her comments in the morning quickly changed to, "Mommy it's light out. Fooood, mommy, fooood." Well, since the nights are getting shorter I knew I would have to think up a better solution, fast! So I now have a special night light in her room hooked up to a timer that goes off at 7:45. And when she sees the light go on, she can get up. The plan is to make the light go off 5 minutes later until it's at 8. I figure that is an OK time for me to get up. I thought about turning on music, but then if she did by chance sleep in, I would hate for the music to wake her up.

Anyhow, the first night I tried this I got Hannah all excited about the light. Cool, I thought, this will work! Well, the next morning at about 7:15 I hear Hannah crying. My thoughts went to the worst possible scenario, "she peed out her diaper. I guess I had better go in there." So I go in there and ask her why she's crying. Get this - she was upset because she wanted to get up but she couldn't because the light hadn't gone off. It cracks me up! It always amazes me when she reminds me with such incidences that I have that much control over her life.

Now she runs into my room in the morning and says, "Mommy light on. Fooood mommy, fooood." And then later in the day she'll tell and reenact the story of seeing the light go on and then running to mommy and daddy's room. It's pretty cute. You will have to ask her about it next time you see her.