gro-clock me this!

Sleep is a commodity that for some reason always comes up short for me. Sure, part of it is that we’re still doing night-time nursing, where during my sleep I have to get up 2-3 times. But there’s also this thing where if the girls wake up in the early morning, I am unable to keep on sleeping. Judge, he’s good at it, and so in Tromsø he was able to have Leona sleep in until 9am or so, as she would just go back to sleep when she didn’t get a reaction from him. Then by 9 she was fully rested and would get up and hang out and play by herself an hour until she was really hungry, and then she’d go and insist Judge get up. On the weekends, however, I’d be getting up with her around 6 or 7am.

Eliana is an early riser too. 5:30am, very consistently. I try to take her out of the room so Leona doesn’t wake up. Previously, if Leona woke up and saw I wasn’t there (when we had a family bed) or now that Eliana isn’t there (they share a room) she would come downstairs, even if she actually was still really tired. Or sometimes she would wake up and want to have her morning nurse, and see it was light outside and want to get up, and I’d have to try and explain that just because it is light outside doesn’t mean it is day-time yet and so she needs to go back to sleep (it was still only 4am or so), and she would have a little bit of a melt down.

I remember a friend of mine (Celinamin!) had mentioned a clock a couple years ago that changed colors letting the kids know when it was ok to get up. Ingenious. So I searched a bit, and found a wide range of these kinds of clocks, with this one being the decided winner. It was ordered 10 min later (luckily I found this supplier, as all others sold it for over NOK200, meaning I’d have to pay sales tax and import tax when I got it in the mail…all the sleep-clocks that are sold in Norway are not only more expensive but not as good, by a long shot even).

 

When we received it, I was super disappointed in the story-book, just junk junk junk. But the clock itself, wow. Leona LOVES it. I set the day-time nap-timer for 5 minutes later, and introduced the concept of saying good night to the sun, seeing the sun wink and close its eyes in response, and then the star coming out and sleeping too, with all the little surrounding stars around it; and that as time passed the stars would disappear one by one until they were all gone, the sun came back, and it was time to get up. Fun!

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The first morning she woke up around 5:30 or 6am, but stayed in bed looking at the clock (there was just one little star left, and I think she thought it was really close to the time to get up because during our explanatory run the stars disappeared really quickly). She waited though, all the way until the sun came. Next morning same thing. I watched on the video-monitor how she was sitting up in bed and looking at the clock now and then, then laying down, fidgeting, but all in all being patient and not leaving the bed even though Eliana was already downstairs with me (amazing!).

And the last two mornings she’s actually slept through the sun coming out, waking up around 7am. Seriously amazing!

I think this clock has totally empowered her. I mean, I know exactly how she felt before, I think. If I wake up and don’t know what time it is, it is often super hard for me to go back to sleep. That’s because here we can’t go by the light outside. During the winter it is still pitch dark in the morning when we need to get up, while in the summer it is different degrees of light all night. So this clock is like having a good routine. Once you have a routine and a known environment, the kids feel free and safe to explore, but if things are always uncertain, they hold on tight to your skirt hems (figuratively speaking in my case of course).

Now, Leona mentions “when we’re done eating two girls will take a bath, then one girl will go upstairs and mama will help her sleep, then the lady will come downstairs and ‘talk about’ with the big girl, and then we have to brush our teeth and go upstairs and say good night to my clock and nurse and sleep” (with various versions of ‘girls’, ‘lady’, ‘me’, ‘you’, ‘mama’, Eliana, etc.), including it fully in her pre-sleep routine, and will check the clock when she wakes up at night to see how many stars are left.

 

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