Sleeper-in-ers

[xekomaya]

My ds is a sleeper-in-er. He will not wake up early for anything. If I do get him up, he is crabby and miserable, even if I do it every day for weeks (I used to have to) he never adjusts and is still crabby in the AM.

I really don't mind sleeping in. I SAH so it's not a big deal to me to have a later schedule, and I'll gladly sleep with him to have a happy baby (and mama). The last few days have been crazy though due to Christmas. We took him to Midnight Mass and he ran around like a nut after with the kids until 1:30am. I think he was the last one standing. It is very slow to get him back on track. It's 1:45 am here and he just fell asleep 15 minutes ago.

Dh is very upset. I try to send him to bed early so he gets enough sleep (since he has to wake early for work) but he doesn't always go and just generally makes himself and all of us miserable. He told me today that it has to change. I'm hoping for objective opinions so:

How do you feel about later-scheduled babies in general? Is there anything wrong with it that I'm missing? and

How would you feel about fighting a sleep schedule to accommodate another family member's wishes?

[lisavark]

My DD is also a night owl. Since she was born, she has always gone to bed for the night at 11 pm. I've tried SO hard to get her on an earlier schedule, and it's really, really difficult. Occasionally I've managed for a night or two, but she always goes back. She also would sleep in till really late in the morning if I let her.

For us, it eventually got to be too difficult. I also SAH but I couldn't handle the unpredictability of never knowing when she was going to nap or go to bed. Particularly nap. By the time she was down to one nap, it got to where if she didn't get up pretty early in the morning, like definitely before 9 and preferably before 8, she wouldn't nap at ALL. And then she'd go to bed early but sleep poorly...it just got us on a bad schedule all around.

I think if I could have gotten on a predictable schedule with the late hours, where I KNEW what time she was going to sleep even if it wasn't the times that she was "supposed" to, then I would have been okay with it.

All that said, she's actually starting preschool two days a week next month, so sleeping in will no longer be an option. Well, preschool doesn't start until 9 am, but seeing as her normal schedule would probably be to sleep in until 9:30 or so, that's not going to work anymore.

However...in your situation, personally, yes, I would change it for your DH's sake. My DD has always been on OUR schedule--we go to bed at 11--so it hasn't been a problem for us per se. And I don't think there's anything "wrong" with a baby going to bed late, although I think it's generally healthier for humans to be somewhat in sync with the sun. But I also think it's nicer for families to be on a similar schedule with each other, especially when you're cosleeping. My DH can never go to bed without us, and I have a hard time going to bed without him. DD, of course, wants both of us with her to fall asleep.

But it's a LOT of work to fight a baby's natural sleep schedule, and it's HARD for the SAHP, so you definitely need to be emotionally on board with the decision before you try it. With my DD, there's nothing I can do to get her to GO to sleep--all I can do to adjust her schedule is to wake her up. Which means a whole lot of sleep-deprived afternoons, and I still don't know if it's going to work. Tonight she fell asleep at 9:30, and it only took her 20 minutes to fall asleep, and that has never happened before ever. Probably a fluke. But I'm hoping.

Good luck, whatever you decide! I would definitely take into consideration the factor of whether you're ever going to send your DS to school and what time he'll need to get up for that. For me, even just playgroups and library storytimes and things like that were a factor--they're all scheduled around "average" naptimes, so if I let DD sleep in the way she wanted to, I would never get to go.