Speaking of sleep, I’ve had to reintroduce a kind-of-fixed bedtime for Ingrid. For quite a long while we had nothing of the sort. When she got tired in the evening, she said so, and went to bed. Now she doesn’t. There are so many things she’d rather do (especially read books) that she can easily stay awake until 9.30, and then be really tired and grumpy when she’s woken around 7 the next morning. Sometimes she didn’t even wake when our alarm went off, and slept until 7.30, and was still tired. So now I start steering her towards the bed sometime around 8.30, to have her in bed by 8.50, and asleep by 9.15–9.30 or so. I don’t like this in principle (I would rather she learned to manage her own sleep) but I like it in practice. The mornings are far more pleasant this way.

I think it may be because she’s again hovering between needing and not needing her daytime nap. If she doesn’t nap, she has no trouble recognizing her sleepiness in the evening. If she does, I need to tell her to go to bed. But at the same time she can’t really manage a whole day at nursery without a nap. Some weekends, yes, but she’s often more active at nursery than at home.