With just three more full weeks of our summer break remaining, my goal is to begin reigning in the children's sleep routines again.
We've yet to ever get wildly out of rhythm around here. I've sometimes heard of even elementary kids staying up till ten, eleven, midnight during the summer, and that is nothing something I've faced yet.
Nonetheless, due to travel and relaxation, my brood has been staying up later and sleeping later.
For the new school year, I calculated out how much time I estimate it will take us to do our school work to be done by what I consider a reasonable time of the day (and based on any afternoon activities). This varies by family, of course.
This year is the first year that I foresee the children needing to be awake by 6:30 a.m. so they can be downstairs, dressed and beds made, by 7:00 a.m. breakfast, because I need to start teaching by 8:00 a.m. Maybe this won't be needed, as I see how the school year really plays out.
Knowing that I'm aiming for a 6:30 rising, I went online and reviewed (yet again) how many hours of sleep it is estimated children of different ages need, and then I calculated bedtimes backwards. One also knows one's own children, and whether one child needs on the shorter or longer range of sleep at any particular developmental stage.
Since my older set of children have been sleeping till 7:30 or occasionally 8:00 naturally, we don't have terribly far to go, but it will still take some concerted effort.
This coming week, my goal is for them to wake up by alarm at 7:00 every day, and be in bed correspondingly early enough, and the following week the goal is 6:30 a.m., so that our first couple weeks of school aren't ruined (I hope) by incredibly crabby children whose bodies have not yet adjusted to waking.
Speaking of alarm clocks, I never envisioned when I had only the youngest of children that homeschooled children ever needed to wake by alarms. However, now I see that I need this aid. Too often this past year, I needed children to wake up, yet I could not walk up the stairs to get them because I was juggling cooking a hot breakfast, a wailing baby, a potty training toddler or fighting preschoolers, and kids I could not leave momentarily by a hot stove top. Half an hour would go by and I still couldn't get upstairs to wake that child, who was too deeply asleep to wake by the brass bell I purchased to call children to meals.
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| Brass bell from Amazon |
If I had a small house and a Ranch home no less, then I might never require alarm clocks, but it's simply way too far--and way too mother-dependent--for me to be waking up each child myself.
Alarm clocks it is! (Any recommendations for your favorite brand? Ours aren't working well and I'd love recommendations.)
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