Spring break was this week and we had big plans to visit Lava Hot Springs and our plan was to stay up there all week. I was going to work part of the week from the resort. Just like everyone else’s Spring Break and Vacation Plans, it was cancelled due to the virus. To try and add excitement to Quarantine and make it fun, I thought we would try and sleep in a couple different rooms.
Basement
We have a Wii in our TV room in the basement. There have been a few times where we have slept down there. The last time, the boy had his bus tent and I slept on the floor, but he has destroyed and outgrown the tent. This time, He wanted to sleep in the couch and I slept on the floor. We ended up going to bed super late and he wasn’t comfortable. He ended up waking up way too early. It didn’t go as planned. He had fun except for the cold.
We were going to try another room, but he said it was too cold downstairs. This is the same boy that wants to sleep with a fan on him when it is 60 degrees in his room. Go figure. We ended up not doing it again.
Our own Rooms
The rest of the week he slept in his room, but he kept waking up at 8am! We kept telling him that “It is OK to sleep in! You are on spring break!”, but he kept waking up at 8am. We tried a few things to try and get him to sleep in but nothing would work.
Jacob loves to sleep with music going in his room when he falls asleep, and he has some Christmas lights that he keeps on. The lights are hooked up to a WiFi controller that allows us to turn them on with a Google Mini.
IFTTT – If This Then That
Here is where the problem comes in. We would ask him “Why did you get up so early?” He would reply “Because it was morning.” Well he finally mentioned “Because the lights turned off, and I wanted to wake up before it got dark.” A few weeks ago, I had checked the WiFi device schedule to make sure it wasn’t shutting the lights off at a specific time, and I couldn’t find it.
This last week, I had an epiphany, I remembered I had set IFTTT up to turn the lights off, because he kept leaving them on when he went to school. Sure enough, it was setup to turn the lights off at 8am! I changed it to 10:15a, because who sleeps past 10:15a? (only my wife). That night he went to bed pretty late, so I wasn’t surprised he was still asleep at 10am the next day. He came down at 10:20a. I asked him “What woke you up?” He said “The lights went off.” SABOTAGE! I found the cause of my boys poor sleep! He is a light sleeper!
Easter
I fixed the lights to turn off at 12p, but unfortunately Easter had generated a lot of excitement in my boy, so he couldn’t sleep past 9am Sunday morning. School starts again on Monday, so I am going to update the schedule to go off at 7:15a, since tat is when I want him up. We’ll see how it works out!