This Hack Is the Only Way I "Sleep In" With a Toddler

Updated on 7/30/2018 at 3:55 PM

POPSUGAR Photography | Angela Elias

I was settling in for a morning meeting, gripping my second cup of coffee and covering my mouth to conceal a yawn, when a fellow mom and colleague took a seat across from me. "Long night?" she asked. "Early morning," I answered before elaborating on the details of my 1-year-old son's sleep schedule.

We followed a sleep training routine that helped him wake up less during the night, but he was still waking up as early as 5:30 a.m., weekends included. Every morning, he would immediately begin to cry and call for someone to pick him up. I was convinced that just 30 more minutes of sleep would be a life-altering gift. "Does he have anything to keep him occupied when he wakes up?" she asked, before explaining how she wakes to the sound of toddler chatter as her son flips through books in his crib. That's when the light bulb sparked.

I had been so careful about keeping things out of his crib — no blankets or stuffed animals — but I hadn't thought of giving him access to books. That night, I gathered a stack of his favorite books. Books with hard pages he could roughly flip through without tearing them to shreds were ideal. I set them on a pouf and dragged it next to his crib.

The next morning, I woke to the sound of a fire alarm ringing, followed by a dog barking, and immediately smiled. I'd accidentally included one of those interactive sound books, this one about a brave little fire truck and his Dalmatian sidekick. I glanced at the monitor on my nightstand and could see that he had pulled several books into his crib and was flipping through them happily. I turned over onto my side and dozed until my alarm went off. As I threw on my robe and headed to his room, I could tell by the sounds he was making which book he was thumbing through.

A year later, we keep a stack of library books in rotation and a basket nearby filled with some of his favorite toys, including a plush sloth and a Spider-Man the size of my forearm. His sleeping patterns have finally settled into a more manageable routine, probably because of his age. Even so, saving him from boredom and us from unnecessarily early wake-up calls has made a world of difference.