The Wife's bit

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Spring is coming Thursday 23 Mar 2006 Well despite the ice on the ground we are now officially 3 days into spring, and the mornings are getting earlier. While the younger members of staff still get up at the crack of dawn, the crack of dawn really now is the crack of dawn. That is to say it is too early for the older members of staff who like to lie in until the last minute before getting them up for school. Short of painting the windows black I need solutions. Anyone? Katy Hello Wifey I sympathise with your problems re: the return of the crack of dawn uprising. We’ve got two junior staff, one of them sleeps like a teenager, which is a blessing, but the other is a dawn riser, which is no fun at all. I did resort to black out curtains last year, and I have to say I’d do it again. Very, very effective. Rather than go for brand new curtains I just bough the heavy duty curtain linings they make for insomniacs and tacked them up for the duration. It worked a treat. My other suggestion would be running them round the garden until ten at night, but unfortunately it’s more tiring for older members of staff, and for all the times it does work wonders, there’s the odd time where they become weirdly adrenalized and behave like tiny clubbers at a rave, which can be counter productive. Kind regards Wifey replies: I've heard good things about blackout curtains - but they're so ugly!!! Exercise and adrenalin are strange things. When we took the younger members skiing last year we had them in ski school for 3 hours in the morning, then lunch followed by another 2-3 hours skiing with us. Then they'd have a quick snack followed by an hour or so of swimiing before tea. We still had problems getting them into bed, and the bad thing was that when they did go to sleep we'd be about 5 minutes behind them. Sue Personally I've always resorted to the threat of a lock on the outside of their bedroom doors. (Hard parenting.) What about the problem of getting them to go to bed while it's still light? We'll have that in a few weeks, Wifey replies: I think I'd go for the lock on our door rather than theirs. That way they can go downstairs and play while we lie in ;) Dunno what I'm going to do when the nights get too light. I guess it'll be back to bedtime fights again.