Shall the 10:00 rule become the 6:00 rule?

First published 7/28/08

It's 6:45pm, do I know where my kids are? Happily, in the same place they are each night at this hour - sleeping soundly in their cribs! Recently, I wrote of our dream of a long, dream-filled night. We now are hitting that objective about 75% of the time. Most nights, the boys are in bed by 6pm and they stay that way until about 6-7am. Now, I don't want all the new moms to be too jealous. Some nights, one or both of them will wake around 4-5am and will experiment with volume until we fetch them and sooth them with a small bottle. But hey, 6am! Most nights! (again, the college roommates may weigh in when they see that 6am is a good wake-up time for me now...not noon!)

Not only that, but they're getting better at napping, and on a normal day when we're at home the whole day, I can usually count on about 6-9 hours (not straight, mind you, but nonetheless...) of free time. Of course, with all this free time, you might expect that I'd be much more organized, but I am so used to being busy with the babies, that I just don't know what to do with all this extra time! (I am wondering how long I can use that excuse before I need to start catching up with the laundry and organizing our bonus room...)

In the last week though, we have a threat to our newfound freedom - baby boys and their diapers! One of our tricks to the night-sleeping is that they are now sleeping on their tummies which is much more 'natural' for the babies. So, picture this - baby boy is on his tummy for 12 hours, and this baby boy is from the "land of lotsapeepee". This boy is also growing quickly, so is on the diaper size border once again, between a 2 and a 3! Well, it may not be frogs and snails and puppy dog tails, but it is sure a baby boy recipe for a mess with no obvious solution.

Last night, we tried just using a larger sized diaper. It got us to about 4am. Tonight, I'm trying another (more expensive) solution - a size 2 diaper with a size 3 diaper over it. A part of me wants this to work, but the pocketbook part of me thinks there must be a cheaper solution. Apparently when they get a little bigger, there are nighttime diapers, but at their current size, "they" don't want them sleeping on their tummies, so there's not much economic purpose for the "diaper-theys" to make smaller nighttimes. And according to Nonnie Connie, when we were little, you could get rubber covers for over the disposable diapers. Do these still exist???

So my quest continues for the consistent full night sleep...In the meantime, I am not revising the house's 9:00 rule. Unless the California Lottery is calling, I'm still not answering the phone before 9am...that's our 1st naptime!