My Early Riser

This is totally unrealated to the blog post but I thought they were cute pictures so I've posted them anyway. When Grantham was 5 weeks old, Jamie went on a business trip to St. Louis and went to a Cardinals game. He came home with this t-shirt and hat. Obviously, they were something that Grantham had to grow into. We thought about them recently and put them on him. We could barely squeeze him into the t-shirt so these pictures are the only time he'll ever wear it :) Maybe we can re-visit the hat when he's a little older...I think it's more a toddler size.

Most of you probably already know (because I talk/complain about it all the time :) that Grantham is an early riser. By early riser I mean he wakes up every morning between 6:00 and 6:30. Now, just because he wakes up at that time doesn't mean we get him that early. We actually leave him in his crib for 45 minutes to an hour every morning. He pretty much just plays in there happily until we go get him. Our thought when we first started this is that he would figure out that he was going to have to stay in there by himself for an hour so maybe eventually he would just sleep an extra hour...well, not so much! We have tried everything we know to get him to sleep in a little later. I would LOVE for him to sleep until 7:00 but let's be honest...if he would just consistently sleep until 6:30 I think I would be happy. Every time we try something new it seems to work for a few days and then we're back to the butt crack of dawn. We've tried putting him to bed earlier, later and blacking out his room and nothing seems to work for more than a day or two. Finally we've just resorted to putting him to bed super early (6:45 PM) because he seems to wake at the same time regardless of when he goes down. One night when we were traveling, he didn't get to bed until 9:30 and he still woke before 7:00! We just figure if we put him to bed earlier at least he's getting some extra nighttime sleep. This is my final attempt to change it...if anyone has any personal experiences with their own children or suggestions they are welcome. If we can't "fix" it after this...I'm just going to accept it and move on. Thanks for your help :)

As a side note, I don't want to seem ungrateful because I am very thankful that he sleeps 11+ hours every night...I just wish it was from 8:00 PM to 7:00 AM instead of 7:00 PM to 6:00 AM. Oh well, I guess we don't always get what we want!