How many times have you been awakened at 4am or 5am in the morning by the adorable face of your little boy or girl who cannot sleep? And how many times have you wished dearly for just 20 more minutes of sleep, let alone another hour or two?

For me, this became especially true when my son first moved from his crib to a bed. No longer was I wakened by the sound of him waking up, but instead he was right there beside my bed. Mommy, can you play with me?

If this at all sounds familiar, let me share a tip that worked for us to help our son sleep in just a little bit more. The trick was not to try change his sleep patterns all at one. It needed to be a gradual and natural process.

What we did was to give our son something he could identify with waking up in the morning. For us this was a special light we placed in his room just for this purpose. We put the light on a timer and told our son that he had to stay in bed until this light came on in the morning.

Now you are asking, how did you get your son to stay in bed with just a light? The secret was to use the light to gradually move his wake time later. The first night, we set the timer to the same time that our son was already waking up ? 4:30am. After a couple days of waking up at 4:30am, we moved the timer back by 15 minutes. Our son slept in until 4:45am without missing a beat. Every couple days, we moved the timer back another 15 minutes. After several weeks, we had our son sleeping in until 7am.

This is not to say that we never had another early morning or that we never had another rough night. But this technique worked perfectly at the time for helping our son, not to mention me and my husband enjoy a little more rest in the morning.

Anne Francis works for Baby Clothes Designer ==>Dragon Tail Baby.