I have a five-year old (beautiful) daughter who is in Kindergarten. I know children of her age need ten to twelve hours, varying on the individual. She's near the top of the range. Its fairly easy to get her to go to bed and when she's had her appropriate amount of sleep, she is either woken easily or wakes herself up and gets going well.
My trouble is this:
- Her bedtime is 7:30 PM
- Her school starts at 8 AM
- For reasons not divulged here, we leave the house between 7:35 AM and 7:40 AM but there is room to push that a bit later
- Her natural rhythm has her being wake-able starting somewhere between 7:15-7:30 (by this I mean she either wakes up herself before I can or I wake her and she gets up fairly easily)
- We eat a small breakfast (water and some primarily grain or fruit dish) and do other preparations (brush teeth, get dressed, get ready to leave, clear off the car in winter, etc...)
So the mornings tend to be a busy, relatively. Ideally, I'd like to reduce that and make the mornings calmer but that seems difficult given the sleep/time constraints and the activity list. Should I just be content in the (pretty easy) lot I have until she gets older and sleeps less or is there some optimization or reduction I could make to reduce the 'mad dash' in the mornings?