Keep your preschooler from waking too early

The Preschoolers Community Group is losing sleep. Their three-foot tall, two-footed, adorable alarm clocks are popping out of bed at the crack of dawn, or earlier. I feel their pain. When my son was 3, he woke up promptly at 6:03 every morning as if he had a job to head off to. By noon, he was cranky and spent which doesn’t work well since preschool ends at one o’clock.

So how do you keep your 3-year-old in bed until a reasonable time? Here’s what worked for us. I bought a digital clock with extra large numbers. I covered the minutes with paper and tape, lots and lots of tape so he couldn’t take it off. I instructed my son that until he saw a 7, he had to go back to bed. If he had to use the restroom, he should go, but unless the clock said 7, he needed to return to bed. I told him he should try to close his eyes and go back to sleep, but if that didn’t work, he should grab a book from his shelf and quietly read. When he saw a 7, he could get up and come knock on our door.

This tip has also been known to work for kids who don’t yet know numbers but who can match objects that look alike. Just draw a 7 on the paper used to cover the minutes and explain to the child that when the numbers match, he can get up for the day.

My son is 4 now and knows about the hours and minutes on a clock, so I’ve since removed the paper. But there’s more to the story; recently, we lost power during a thunderstorm and the clock in my son’s room was accidentally reset 15 minutes behind the actual time. The first morning, I didn’t notice, but the second morning my son knocked on our door promptly at 7:15 brought a sly smile to my face. Those extra 15 minutes are blissful. I’ll reset his clock to the right time….someday….
What are your tips for helping your preschooler get a full night’s sleep?
Photo: snowbear \ MorgueFile

The secret to unlocking creativity & joy: Do something!

Two weeks ago a bright yellow little book titled The Book of Doing: everyday activities to unlock your creativity and joy was delivered to my doorstep.
As its title implies, it's a book about rolling up your sleeves and tackling small creative projects -- with lots of bite-sized ideas to inspire you to take action.
As I quickly flipped through the pages, I couldn't help but be drawn in by the gorgeous illustrations (no org-porn photos to "inspire" and simultaneously paralyze, yippee!). The author's tone was smart and friendly; reading the project ideas kind of made me feel like I was sharing a few daydreams over a cup of coffee with a good girlfriend.
And the author's personal journey gave me even more reason to love what was there.
By day, she's the Publisher of Advertising Age.
Like so many of my good friends, she had a vague sense that something was missing as she approached her 40th birthday. While happy in her career, her creative side was languishing.
She wondered if she should quit her job to try to find her passion.
In the end, she found that simply doing things, small projects, like baking cupcakes with her daughter, unlocked the joy and the childlike sense of wonder that had been missing from her everyday, spent mostly in meetings and in Power Point. As she looked at her life as a whole, she realized it, too, was an arts-and-crafts project -- only as colorful, interesting and exciting as she made it.
So she starting doing more.
And the joy she found in doing spilled over into every area of her life. And led to her write the book, which is now inspiring others to do the same.
I won't lie - I've had more than my fair share of "what am I DOING with my life?" existential crises over the past two years (I turned 40 in 2012). So I decided to put some of her ideas to the test to see if they'd help clear some cobwebs from my own mind.
There were so many projects to choose from.
In the end, I found I couldn't stop at just one. Here's what I've been up to these past two weeks:

Honestly - I, too, felt the energized and a surge of joy from simply doing. I highly recommend it!
Have you ever felt like something was missing - stuck in a rut? Do you think a creative, hands-on project could help you snap out of your funk? If you have a go-to project, I'd LOVE to hear it.

Working moms laugh and smile more than SAHMs

In her guest column, titled The Triumph of the Working Mother, Stephanie Coontz lays out what she sees as clear evidence that working mothers are less depressed and angry, more inclined to smile and laugh, or at least remember smiling and laughing, than those moms who stay at home with their children.

"In a 2012 Gallup poll, stay-at-home mothers in low-income families were less likely than employed moms at the same income level to report that they had smiled, laughed, or enjoyed themselves “yesterday.”

Coontz bolsters this theory of increased well being for working moms with plenty of definitive-sounding statements, including:

"At all income levels, stay-at-home mothers report more sadness, anger, and episodes of diagnosed depression than their employed counterparts."

"Employed moms spend fewer hours per week with their children than stay-at-home mothers, but they spend more time with their children than homemakers did in 1965!"

"A recent multiyear study by the sociologists Adrianne Frech and Sarah Damaske found that women who worked full time following the birth of their first child had better mental and physical health at age 40 than women who had not worked for pay."

No links are provided to the sources of these claims, and I, for one, am not about to start digging up and analyzing data from over 50 years of studies. Because, aside from agreeing that working mothers should not, after all this time, still be seeking validation for their "choices," I don't quite understand why we need to be comparing them, by going head to head with stay-at-home-moms, in a competition of who enjoys themselves more, in order to get them the support they need.
The very fact that an article claiming working moms are less depressed and angry than moms who stay at home has the word "triumph" in the title, is more than a little unsettling to me.
What, if it is true, is so triumphant about the thought of millions of depressed and angry stay-at-home mothers?
Obviously the well-being of mothers is worth talking about. Whether moms work or not, the topic of mama rage, anti depressants, and moms self-medicating with wine comes up an awful lot on mom forums. As a mom who's resorted to Prozac more than once, I am personally curious about what's driving this perpetual unease and how it relates to stress and motherhood.
I would also love to know if the well-being of fathers is being so closely scrutinized and if, with the everpresent shifting of the tides, it ever will.
Lastly, if it's true that all these moms are so miserable at home, how can we better support them? How can we better support all mothers? That to me is just as important as making sure moms who work are seeing improved family leave policies.
Do you believe working moms are "happier" than SAHMs? If so, do you have any insight as to why that might be? Is it as simple as getting respect, and external reward, for your time and energy?