Schedule!

I am fighting my kids and my lazy procrastinating inner urges and trying to develop some type of a daily schedule. It is not going so good. One night both kids are asleep by 8pm then they both wake up around 9 and are up a couple of hours. I am trying, but this is actually really hard.

To complicate things even further my kids couldn't be more different from one another. My daughter is like me and would rather stay up late and sleep in. My son is ready for bed by 7:30 most nights and awake at about 6:30 most mornings. You could set a clock to him. When he starts to get cranky at night I know its almost 7. He needs the schedule most of all because if he is up to long. He becomes a screaming monster!

I know my daughter needs some regularity with her daily life to. Most days she has trouble taking a nap. If I can't get her to sleep before 4 I make her stay up. Or at least I try to. She can't sleep after 4 or she will be up until midnight or one. The worst night was 3am when she fell asleep. Then of coarse baby brother was up at 6:30 all smiles! I just don't know what to do.

Part of the problem is she has never learned to fall asleep on her own. She falls asleep in my arms or in the car. That's it! So if baby brother is awake then I can't lay down with her. I tried putting her in bed and letting her scream for a while that had disastrous consequences. For now I am just doing the best I can. Hoping the day I can just tell her to go to bed comes sooner than later.

I am flexible on what we do during the day, but I try to get some things in. We watch Muzzy or some thing in Spanish at least once a day. I don't make them watch it, but I have it on so they can watch if they want to. I try to play with each of them separately a few times during the day. As well as letting them play together and by themselves. We read every day, and work on sign language. My daughter learns them quicker than I do. Plus, she makes up her own if she doesn't know one for what she is trying to say. We go a lot of places as well. Which also makes a schedule hard to follow.