The Curse of the Early Riser

If you are blessed with children who actually let themselves sleep, I am sticking my tongue out at you right now. If you have the curse of the early riser, you will know exactly where I am coming from. This has to be one of the most annoying things to deal with as a parent because you have absolutely no control over it. Nope, not at all. You can try many things to see if they will work to get your child to sleep in but sometimes....well, you just have to deal with it and get used to waking up early.
Troy has been an early riser since birth. I think that I can count on one hand how many times he's slept past 7AM and that is late for him if that tells you anything. For a very long time he was up between 5 and 5:30AM and for a short time, 4:30AM (this is when I was pregnant with Will so you can imagine my joy). He's now up between 6 and 6:30. I can also say that he has never slept 12 hours either--he's a 10 hour sleeper normally. And here's another silly thing about Troy--he's a very short napper. Maybe once in a while he would take a nice long nap of 2 hours (I know some of you are laughing because your children take 3+ hours), but he usually naps no more than 1 hour 15 minutes. We tried so many things to change both this fun early rising issue and his napping, but nope, nada, nothing...Here are a few examples:
1) Putting him to bed later. Nope, still up but then just super cranky because he got less sleep and still didn't nap well.
2)Putting to bed earlier. This *sometimes* worked but then it means he never sees Daddy so that creates a whole different issue
3) Room darkening curtains
4) Bedtime snack so that hunger wouldn't wake him
5) Bringing him bed with me in the AM--our boys never got cosleeping at all. They thought it was play time
6) Ignoring him--HA! This child can't be ignored
7) Small snack, back to bed. Yeah, no
8) Telling him he could get up when the sun came up. This just resulted in him yelling "Mommy, is the sun up?" repeatedly
I am sure there were more, but you get the idea. He now knows he can't get out of his room until 7 but I am blessed with the problem of being a light sleeper so I am awake anyway because I can hear him turn the pages of his books. SIGH
Now Will is here and I thought we wouldn't have this issue. He was much better about sleeping until 7:30 or GASP even 8:00 at times, but in the last 2 months, this has changed. He has now decided that what Troy is doing is much more exciting so he's up between 6 and 6:30 now too. SIGH again. At least he let's himself take giant naps more often.
I know. Welcome to Parenthood. There will be a day that comes when we're dragging them out of bed trying to get them to go to school and help out, but until then, I guess I will just forget about sleeping past 6. Sleeps overrated anyway.