Quiet Mornings

You will NEVER hear us complain about how Kaylani sleeps at night. EVER. In fact, we don't complain so much that it bothers some people. For as far back as I can remember, Kaylani has slept around 12 hours a night, and that's a GREAT thing. Well, at least we thought she was sleeping for 12 hours.

Most nights, Kaylani is in bed by 7:30pm, and asleep by 7:45pm. And most mornings when I wake up at 6:45am, she's still asleep. Then finally, around 7:15am, she's awake in her crib, which according to Mommy, is because I woke her up while I was showering. On days when I go to the gym much earlier, she sleeps in a little bit until 7:30am or so before she wakes Mommy up. And on weekends, when we're fortunate enough to not have anything to wake up for, we've slept in until 8am or even 8:30am. But somedays, like today, she wakes up at 6:15am, but is back down at 7am, awake again at 7:15am, but back down again at 7:30am. So the question is, what time does Kaylani wake up, and what does she do?

During the week, its easy to say that Kaylani seems to wake up between 6:45am and 7:15am. Since that's 5 days of the week, you'd think that she wakes up at that time on Saturday and Sunday too since I don't think she has concept of weekdays vs weekends yet. Some days, I've seen her asleep still at 7:30 or later (especially on days I have to leave for work early), so its not consistently the same time. But one thing we have noticed is that there are definitely days when she wakes up and sits there. Quietly. By herself. The scary thing is that we have no idea for how long.

We have a video monitor and a sound activated audio monitor in her room. In the mornings, the audio monitor rarely goes off, which means either she's not talking, or its not picking things up. Since it works fine when we test it, its not the latter, so we can fairly confidently say she's just not talking. So that leaves the video monitor. On the mornings we wake up on our own, looking at the video monitor always surprises us because she doesn't move much, at least not enough to be picked up by the camera.

When we look closely, she's typically laying there playing with her belly button, or sitting there staring out into her room. A few days ago, she was laying there and said "I see green light" to me when I finally went to get her (which means she was staring at the camera which has a green light on it). Other days, I'll walk in and she'll just stare through her crib at me and smile until I come closer. And then other days she'll proclaim that she's still sleeping, or that Grover/Telly/other animals in her bed are still sleeping. And on some days, she'll stand up and start clapping and proudly announce (and show) that her socks are on her hands (which is pretty impressive when I think back to the struggles of trying to put mittens on by myself as a child).

What's all of this mean? It means that our little girl is quite easily self entertained, but that doesn't stop us from feeling guilty for leaving her to her own devices for who knows how long. It also means she may not be sleeping for 12 hours since she could be doing all of this in the middle of the night too. Most importantly, it means that we're used to Kaylani being in her crib for 12 hours a night which allows us to watch TV, sleep, etc. And its that last part that might come back to bite us some day. But for now, we'll take what we can get because the way it is now means we're all happy, and we've got no guilt about that.

Speaking of happy, check out new pictures I posted in Kaylani's album. They're from the past month, and include a sneak peak at her Halloween costume. More to come from that! Happy Halloween!