I still have a problem with his sleeping. It’s as though he sleeps more now to make up for my keeping him awake when he was a baby—I followed Gina Ford but I didn’t take into account that her entire formula was based on keeping baby awake for certain hours during the day so baby would sleep at night. I had a baby that would happily sleep all day and then go on and sleep all night too. And I would phone TLC (baby clinic) in tears and ask what I could do to make my baby stay awake—in retrospect, I’m not sure how I escaped being committed.

He now sleeps during the day, goes to bed at night at a decent hour … but wakes me up reaaaaally early. Teaching him his numbers early on has paid off though—when he started wandering through to our room to climb into bed with us close to 5 a.m., I put a digital clock in his room and told him he was not allowed to come through until 6. The first few mornings he came through at 5.06, 5.26, 5.46, 5.16 … until he figured out (with some gentle, hair-pulling persuasion) that the 6 had to be on the left, not the right. We now have a perfect alarm clock…  pre-set until it reaches the teenage years.