Anybody have any success with the bunny alarm clock?

[lisasimpson]

Hi there,

our 3.5yr old has consistently woken early (5.30 or earlier!) since he was a baby.  No amount of altering his bedtime hour/food before bed/darkening the room has any effect.  He no longer naps in the day as it is then difficult to get him to sleep at a reasonable hour at night (and the knock-on effect is that he still wakes up early and grumpy the next day) bedtime is at 7.30 and he is asleep by 8pm with no night interruptions.  He is clearly tired during the day (as are we!) so he is not getting enough sleep. 
this is becoming more of any issue now as he is also waking up his four month old brother (who has just started sleeping through the night!) and I don't want him to start thinking this time of day is acceptable to get up as well! We try to insist on him staying in his room until 6.00 but he has no concept of when 6.00 is, so keeps popping in and out of our room.
  I have been looking at the bunny alarm clocks for ages and wondering if anyone has had any success with them?
thanks very much
Lisa

[Johanne]

I'm afraid my then destructive DS (he's 5 now) just broke it apart - pulled the ears off and everything......

Jo

[Mandy]

Hi Lisa, we've been going through a similar situation with our son. Just turned 3 and suddenly was fearful of the dark and wanted his cot side off. Since then his sleep has been quite interrupted whereas before he was a great sleeper. So it's been a period of change and we've tried various tactics. Feel that we are almost there now. So what's worked is...

Having a bunny alarm. We tried the traditional one but when the eyes and ears on the bunny woke up it was so loud it scared him!  So we found another clock which uses light to distinguish night and morning (Kidsleep) Bit more expensive but much better for us. Are you UK? We got ours in J Lewis, you can order from johnlewis.com too. He was waking up really early (between 4 and 6) so we set the clock at 6 first of all then crept it forward by 5 mins a day until we are now at 6.45. Maybe once he starts nursery and is more tired during the day then we can maybe creep it forward a little more. We have a chart with happy faces  and grumpy faces  , just hand drawn. When we all were lacking in sleep we explained that we all had grumpy faces and we are consistently on happy faces now. We also installed a travel gate over his bedroom door. We held off until the last minute to do this as DH and I really didn't like the idea and DS didn't at first. But perversely DS now likes it  . I think he maybe felt a little insecure with the rail off his cot bed and this adds something back into the feeling of security. We have put some toys in his room too now thinking that he may want to play with them until it's time to wake us up but he doesn't like to do this and prefers to stay in bed and wait for the rabbit to wake up.

Hope this helps Lisa.

X+x

[Katet]

we have a low wattage light on a timer & have since ds#1 was in a bed & he was told he could get out of bed when it came on... works a treat, it is not bright enough nor makes any  sound so he doesn't get woken by it on the occasions he wakes after it turns on, we gradually moved it from his wake up of 6am to 7am & if ds#2 wakes him & is up early I have to go in to turn it on before he will get out of bed... a friend followed the idea & has worked well for her

[Johanne]

Actually Mandy's post has just reminded me - the noise the bunny's mechanics make when waking up used to wake up our DS too. It was one of the reasons we didn't use it after a while.

Jo

[Johno & Aurelias Mum]

We do the same as Kate, although ours is plugged in to a really dim light that changes colour.  He knows that if its not on, its not time to get up.  It only took a week or so of going in and saying that in the morning til he got the hang of it (Johno is only 2, so a bit younger than the other examples here).  Even now, he doesn't leap out of bed when it comes on, I hear him saying 'Red, green, blue.....' as the colours change.

I chose the light because if by some miracle he was stil asleep, I didn't want to wake him and I used it to move the sleeping time very gradually a bit later.  So it was set for 5.30 to start with so it would come on very shortly after he woke, then I changed it to 5.40 etc etc now we are on 6.15 which is fine with me.  I found that if he saw it wasn't on, he often dozed off again.

[lisasimpson]

thanks everyone, unfortunately he already has some night lights on during the night so he doesn't get scared/can see to get to the toilet if necessary.
Shame about the clock but at least I know now!
I am in the U.K. so will check out the John Lewis link - thanks for that suggestion Katlet . I like the grumpy face idea - I had a quiet chat with DS this morning about mummy and daddy feeling tired and sad and he must have been thinking about it because a couple of hours later he came up to me and said quite sincerely 'sorry mummy for waking you up!' I feel a bit mean now 
Lisa