Bad timing!

Ian has been sleeping through the night for several weeks. He hadn't been getting up any earlier than 5:50am. Yesterday he was up from 2:50-3:30am. This morning he woke up at 4:25 and would sleep in my arms but not in his crib. I thought if I had to get up that early I might as well get some work done while holding him, but he would wake up when I'd try to grade projects via the computer. It was very frustrating to #1 not be able to sleep at 4:30am as I had stayed up a little past 10pm (late for me) or #2 at least get some work done. The reason I say it was bad timing was because my parents and brother were here. I felt badly for them both mornings as even Ian's usual wake time of 6am is very early in my parents and brother's opinions. It also led to less sleep for me because if guests hadn't been here, I would have let Ian cry, but I was hoping to minimize their sleep interruption as much as possible. If Ian wakes up prior to 6am tomorrow, I'm just letting him cry as I don't want him to get back in the habit of getting up during the night. Friday morning I gave him a little milk, but this morning I only rocked him as I thought feeding him that early would train his body to expect that. Hopefully he'll sleep through the night tonight as he had been the last several weeks as I don't like letting him cry.

You'd think he'd have taken a nice nap or two today since his day started so early. Yesterday his first nap was 1 hour long and his second was 30 minutes. Today both of his naps were at the most 30 minutes, and this resulted in wanting VERY badly to sleep around 4-5:30pm. He kept falling asleep (practically standing up), but we kept waking him up. We're not going back to 3 naps a day, Ian!

In light of his sleep troubles and how cold and windy it was today, we didn't go to Hershey Park. I was really disappointed as our plans also fell through the last 2 years, but I know we did the right thing by staying home. Being in the car for 3.5 hours (RT) wouldn't have helped his sleep problems. I think sleeping in the car yesterday was part of the problem. I'm planning to go to bed around 7pm tonight (after I put Ian down but before Nadia goes down) so that even if he gets up early I'll get a decent amount of sleep.

I used to give students until the last week of the semester to complete a large project in the language arts class. Lately I've made it due the week before Thanksgiving so I have more than a week to grade it. That has worked in the past, but not this time. Each paper is usually between 25-40 pages long. I haven't made much progress on grading them yet. I'm hoping to finish them by Thursday. That goal seems impossible at the moment, but I'll keep striving toward it anyway. At this time I'm really glad I'm not working next semester.