Sleep (or the lack thereof) and parenthood often go hand in hand. Like I’ve said before, I was naive enough to think that our sleep woes would end once Kaiden was a toddler. But no. We’ve experienced every regression plus some!
For my long time readers, you know that K often woke up quite early. No matter what we tried (going to sleep earlier, going to sleep later, changing up his bedtime routine, etc.), he consistently woke up in the 5 o’clock hour (if not earlier). And this is as recently as November/December 2019.
One night, as we laid our exhausted heads to bed, I asked Vishnu what he thought of a toddler clock. After sharing my sleep woes on Instagram, a few followers recommended getting one. He said he was willing to try anything to get Kaiden to sleep until 6:00. Ha!
After looking up a few of the ones that were recommended to me, we finally settled on the LittleHippo Mella Read to Rise Children’s Sleep Trainer Clock. There was no rhyme or reason as to why we chose this one to be honest…more than anything it had better reviews that the rest.
So this clock is really simple. You essentially set your child’s sleep time and you set the wake time, and then thirty minutes before the wake time, the ring around the clock turns yellow. This is to help the child slowly wake up (more on our experience with this in a minute). Then when it’s your scheduled wake time, the ring turns green. In most, cases, this is when your child can get of bed or call out to you.
In our experience, the yellow light would cause Kaiden to wake up…and not slowly! So instead of telling him he had to wait for the green light to call out for us, we tell him to wait for the yellow light. We set the clock to a 6:30 am wake up time so that the yellow ring turns on at 6:00 am.
If I’m making this sound complicated, please know that it’s not! Just takes some adjusting based on your child.
A few notes…
Don’t assume this will work from day 1. Some days, Kaiden still wakes up at 5:45, and I have to go in and lay on the bed and tell him he has to wait to get up until he sees the yellow light. Depending on when you start, it will take your toddler some time to adjust to a clock wake up.
We do change the wake up time on the weekends to 7:30 in the hopes that K sleeps until 7. This has worked a handful of times!
This clock has other features like an alarm, a nightlight, etc. We don’t use them (yet) but you get more for your buck than what we use it for.
Anyways, like I said, this was not a magical sleep solution for us, but it has worked wonders! Kaiden has slept longer with this than when we did anything else. Fingers crossed that it only gets better from here!
Let me know if you have any questions (in the comments), and most importantly, if you are dealing with a toddler who doesn’t love to sleep in, know that you’re not alone!
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