Telling Time

We encourage Evan to sleep in til 7:00. We notice that if he wakes up any earlier, he gets tired and cranky really fast. So I used to tell him, "It's too early. It's still ne-ne time. Go back to sleep." Then I started saying, "Sleep in til 7:00." Of course, he has no way of knowing when 7:00 is. So we showed him on his clock when 7:00 is. He has sports balls instead of numbers on his wall clock, so we call it "7:00 soccer ball." Last week, I was feeding Ellena in her room at 6:30. I heard Evan in his room walking around and playing with toys. (This is unusual, since he usually wakes up and calls out for us from bed.) Then, at 7:00 on the dot, he called out, "Momma! It's 7:00 soccer ball!"

He has since become obsessed with time. He constantly asks throughout the day what time it is. One time he had a hard time falling asleep at naptime. I showed him that he needed to sleep til "4:00 baseball". He ended up crashing and waking up at 4:45. He asked what time it was and I told him. He then said, "I slept through!"

The last couple days, Evan missed a nap and went to bed late. So thankfully, he caught up on some sleep by sleeping til 8:00 the last couple mornings. He woke up a little before then, but waited til the top of the hour before calling out, "Poppa, it's 7:00 soccer ball!" Poppa said, "No, it's 8:00 basketball, silly!"